Unveiling InMobi 3.0

It feels like just yesterday that a bunch of us met for coffee and came away with a dream: to build a technology company out of India. A bold dream for that time.

It’s been 11 years since then and we have grown, struggled, transformed and continued scaling! Of course, the decade wasn’t without its challenges, but each one of those challenges helped us leap closer to what we are today and also kept alive the spirit to dream bold.

We pivoted from mKhoj to InMobi, and we became one of the first global technology companies based out of India. In fact, we were one of the first few tech companies to build a large business in China.

Our success put us in the limelight way ahead of all our peers. The tech evangelists took notice of us at a time when we weren’t even done creating waves. In just a matter of few years, we were a technology disruptor being covered on MIT Technology Review, the CNBC Disruptor 50 and Fast Company’s Most Innovative companies list.

Obviously, not all the growth happened just because of us. We were lucky enough to spot capable businesses in other areas, and quick enough to get them within us to form a bigger and stronger team together. Sprout, MMTG Labs, Metaflow Solutions, AerServ and Pinsight Media — each of our acquisitions filled a gap that InMobi had at that point of time, and each of these has been a tremendous factor in the heights that we have achieved.

We have seen major growth in emerging markets like China and Asia with each contributing 25% of our revenue and the remaining coming from the U.S.. InMobi is the only company that has attempted to do well in both China and the U.S. We have become cost efficient operationally, resulting in operational profitability beginning three years ago.

Disruption can’t happen without innovation. So we continued investing into our core advertising business. Marketers were looking for integrated solutions across advertising and marketing and pushing back siloed solutions. We understood this very well., so we started building and integrating our advertising suite to include platforms for marketers.

Around the same time, we were getting awed by the power that data was bringing to our existing platforms. It is well understood now that only those platforms that leverage data will thrive in the future. Fortunately, we had already started building these platforms, software that solve real business problems using data.

Providing this to the external world so that every data source and data user got tangible returns from their data was an evident next step. In a short while, we were using data for everything from manufacturing ball bearings to monitoring thermal plants to urban planning.

But did we hear anyone talking about enhancing user experience using data? And then, it hit us., the idea to build a data-driven platform to affect something that has always been very dear to us: the consumer experience. One thing followed another and all of a sudden,we were building an AI-driven content discovery platform for the end consumer!

What seemed as natural offshoots of our core business turned out to be three new businesses with humongous potential. The feeling of thrill was unfathomable.

Fast forward two years. With the new businesses successfully testing the waters, I believe that the time has come to spin these components out as independent companies, to ensure they get the focus, investment and autonomy that is necessary for their growth.

Precisely for this, I am pleased to share the news that InMobi has organized itself into a holding company structure - InMobi Group, a holding company with the following three independent business.

1. InMobi Marketing Cloud
   With a mission to drive real connections between brands and consumers, we envisioned a business that transgressed the boundaries of the ad tech and martech world to deliver a unified solution to the CMO. InMobi Marketing Cloud is a suite of integrated ad tech and martech platforms, supplemented by InMobi’s exclusive mobile intelligence for targeting. With our incumbent ad business expanding to include marketing platforms, we will truly be a one-stop solution for the digital CMO’s needs. In fact, we are the only player providing a mobile-first approach to all marketing needs from market research to customer engagement, a feat unchallenged so far!


2. Glance
   Glance is our first bet on the consumer side. What started as a mere conversation around “How do we improve the lockscreen experience for a user?” catapulted into a massive business idea with all leading smartphone brands signing onto the idea within the first two years of inception! Glance serves as a gateway to the internet for users, helping them discover personalized content and services right on their lockscreen. Thanks to our accelerated pace of partnerships, Glance is now live by default on 70% of all new smartphones in India and is making headway in the Southeast Asia market as we speak. In less than a year, it has grown rapidly to become the fourth largest content platform in India with an impressive 36M+ DAUs and 22 minutes of daily usage per user! Call me a maverick, but I believe Glance is going to fundamentally change the way we consume content.


3. TruFactor
   As I write, there is a data explosion that is happening around us. There are companies sitting on huge amounts of data, figuring out how to store, use and protect the data. And on the other side, we have companies who want access to data that helps them make better decisions for their business. TruFactor serves as the missing link, helping data-rich businesses manage their data in a secure environment and simultaneously providing the end users with the control, choice and transparency they want. With our technology and team of data scientists, I am convinced that TruFactor will disrupt the way businesses leverage data.

We have also instituted a highly capable leadership to guide these businesses independently - While the InMobi Group continues to be led by me, InMobi Marketing Cloud and TruFactor will be headed by my co-founders Abhay Singhal and Piyush Shah as their respective CEOs.

So folks, that’s the new InMobi for everyone. Three seemingly different businesses held together by the vision to ‘empower any and every user interacting with our product’, technology and a culture that has become a force to reckon with in itself.

I am optimistic and excited for the future as we take InMobi and its three business into the next phase of growth and coexistence.

Wishing the team great luck for all that is going to come our way.

Naveen Tewari