The majority of startup success stories seem obvious after the fact. In fact, many were so close to failure as to be unrecognizable.
InMobi can be an example of this. The company was established in 2007 as an SMS search platform, named mKhoj. The firm operated in a market that was not growing fast enough and was almost on the verge of bankruptcy. Facing mounting challenges, the founders decided to abandon the original approach and switch to mobile advertising.
That was the turning point.
Today, InMobi is one of the world’s largest independent mobile advertising and marketing technology companies, operating in over 150 countries and providing its services to more than 30,000 brands worldwide and reaching over 2 billion mobile users. From a modest angel investment of $ 500,000, it has grown to be India’s first ever unicorn startup and the most talked about tech success story of India.
The Founders Behind InMobi
InMobi was established in 2007 by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta, and Abhay Singhal. All four entrepreneurs had a dream of revolutionizing the technology industry by creating a company that would be capable of solving consumers’ problems on a large scale.
The first was mKhoj, an SMS-Query service that intended to enable information search through SMS, which was promising at a time when smartphones were still very new in India. The founders worked from a small apartment, experimenting with various business models that would work.
In terms of resources, this team managed to secure around $500,000 of funding from Mumbai Angels, which allowed them to develop the platform and administer its initial testing.
The inception of mKhoj and the reasons for its lackluster performance
The idea was brilliant, but MKhoj was missing a key point.
The market didn’t have enough potential.
The SMS search platform was not scalable, customer adoption was changing fast, and the mobile web was starting to scale. While the startup had developed a working product, the founders understood that it would be difficult for the business to scale into a major technology platform.
They began to run out of funds and had to decide what to do next. Company accounts reported the loss of motivation from the team, and some employees persisted in their work even when they did not know whether they would get paid.
Instead of pursuing a path offering less room for increased achievement, the founders decided to re-engineer the entire enterprise.
The Pivot That Changed Everything
It was the turning point that ultimately led the company to stop focusing on mKhoj and shift to something new.
The founders were aware of an impending revolution that was sweeping across global markets, where people would consume vast amounts of information through mobile phones. Despite this, with the increasing consumption through mobile phones, the advertising landscape did not recognize this shift, with infrastructure continuing to be centered around the desktop.
Rather than participating in SMS search, they determined that development was the best course of action in terms of efficiently connecting advertisers with the mobile customer.
The company then changed its name to InMobi and laid out a strategy to convert itself into a mobile-first advertising platform.
This was a rather ambitious gamble. The team was going away from its original product, it was entering an intensely competitive market, and its vision of the future was not yet fully ready.
The gamble paid off.
Building a Global Mobile Advertising Platform
InMobi turned out to be different from many Indian startups at the time.
The company pursued a global-first strategy; first expanded into Southeast Asia, Africa, then into Europe, and finally entered the US market. This adoption of an international strategy allowed tapping into the larger advertising budgets and growing faster.
Concurrently, InMobi used a technology approach. Instead of functioning as an ad agency, it developed a scalable platform that unified the advertisers, publishers, and mobile users.
By being mobile-first, it gained an edge over its competitors, which were not focusing on mobile as the adoption of smartphones increased exponentially worldwide.
In 2014, InMobi had achieved 759 million monthly active users in 165 countries, becoming one of the world’s largest independent mobile advertising networks.
Becoming India’s First Unicorn
Much has happened along the way, but the most defining moment in InMobi’s story was in 2011.
InMobi, which received a $200 million investment from SoftBank, became India’s first unicorn startup.
This was also a very important milestone for the country, as India was emerging as a hotbed of entrepreneurship and venture investments. This investment was a validation that Indian technology companies could build truly world-class companies and raise large sums of capital.
The funding of InMobi has enabled further scaling through the growth phase and its entry into mobile advertising.
Growth Through Innovation and Acquisitions
During the growing stage, the company still kept investing in new technologies, acquisitions, and research and development.
Strategic acquisitions such as Sprout and MMTG Labs enhanced the company’s core strengths and expanded the product portfolio.
The company also entered native advertising, video advertising, publisher monetization, and programmatic marketing solutions.
These moves evolved InMobi from a single product advertising platform to a diversified AdTech ecosystem across forces that can cater to the needs of both advertisers and publishers at scale.
Challenges Along the Way
However, this achievement was not without setbacks:
The pivot to mobile advertising had to be sold to investors and to all other stakeholders as a bigger opportunity than SMS search. Going international exposed operational complexities and regulatory issues.
Competition also heightened, with firmed up positions of leading multi-capital companies such as Facebook and Google taking the advertising business.
Similar to a host of other rapidly scaling tech companies, InMobi experienced restructuring and the challenge of balancing growth with margins.
Yet, its ability to adapt to a dynamic market environment became one of its strengths.
The Rise of Glance
InMobi ran not merely as a publisher but later expanded into other areas.
The company introduced Glance, a lock-screen content and discovery platform that provides targeted content directly to users’ smartphones.
The business sprang into rapid growth.
Glance announced 50 million daily active users during a significant fundraising milestone, and later grew to over 230 million active consumers worldwide.
Glance’s success proved that InMobi could go beyond its core advertising business and create large consumer technology products.
Understanding InMobi’s Business Model
InMobi has three complementary business divisions:
Its advertising platform enables brands to target their campaigns to mobile users and provides programmatic advertising solutions for effective media buying. In addition, it offers tools to publishers for monetising their digital assets.
Other sources of revenue are video ad sales, native ad sales, brand engagement tools, consumer technology products, and ecosystem partnerships.
Such a diversified model means that the company is not relying on any one revenue stream, but due to its diversification takes part in multiple areas of the digital economy.
InMobi by the Numbers
The scale of InMobi’s growth becomes clear when viewed through its metrics:
| Metric | Details |
| Angel Financing | Based on angel financing of approximately 500,000 |
| SoftBank Investment | Outstanding $200 million for SoftBank |
| Global Presence | Operates across 150+ countries |
| User Reach | Serves more than 2 billion users |
| Brand Customers | Serves over 30,000 brands |
| Office Presence | Offices across multiple regions, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, and the South Pacific |
| Workforce | Employs around 2,500 people globally |
| FY23 Performance | Reported around $281 Million in revenue and $41 Million in profit for FY23 |
| Glance Scale | Built Glance into a platform used by over 230 million active consumers |
These numbers show how far that company has come from its early startup days.
Key Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn from InMobi
The most significant takeaway from InMobi’s story is that:
Time and resources alone did not keep the founders attached to their initial idea; rather, they considered market realities and embraced a pivotal shift that was always going to be difficult.
The significance of global thinking, technology-led differentiation, and continuous innovation is clearer.
Most significant of all, InMobi illustrates that sustainable long-term advantage is best achieved by staying ahead of major industry trends—even if their impact is not immediately obvious.
What’s Next for InMobi?
According to InMobi, advertising is undoubtedly entering an era of excitement and progress driven by factors such as artificial intelligence, automation, personalization, and commerce integration. InMobi is adequately prepared to scale new heights in this world.
As well as working to consistently expand into new AI-underpinned advertising experiences, consumer technology platforms, and international development now.
With a strong footprint across the advertising and content ecosystems, InMobi continues to be one of the most powerful technology companies of India, and a relevant player on the world stage of AdTech.
Conclusion
The story of InMobi is a story not just of creating a successful start-up. Rather, it is more about sensing change before the market does so and having the audacity to reinvent your own company.
From a fledgling SMS-search startup based out of a one-bedroom apartment to a transnational AdTech company powering billions of people worldwide, InMobi’s saga is all about how direction shifts, technological excellence, and transnational dreams can have a simple idea evolve into an industry directive.
FAQs
1. Who founded InMobi?
InMobi was founded by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta, and Abhay Singhal in 2007. It was founded as ‘mKhoj’, which used SMS for search. Subsequently, it evolved into a mobile advertising platform.
2. Why did InMobi change from mKhoj to mobile advertising?
However, the founders came to realize that the search was too narrow in scope and potential. As soon as they saw the capacity for mobile internet, their minds quickly turned to mobile advertising and improved InMobi.
3. Why is InMobi considered India’s first unicorn startup?
In 2011, SoftBank invested 200M USD in InMobi, valuing the company at over 1 billion USD. This was India’s first ‘unicorn startup’.
4. What does InMobi do today?
InMobi is a global mobile advertising platform that allows marketers to reach mobile audiences through innovative advertising, various forms of programmatic marketing, publisher monetisation, and consumer technology platforms. It covers more than 30000 brands and millions of potential customers.
5. What is Glance, and how is it connected to InMobi?
Glance is an InMobi product. It is a consumer technology platform that delivers content, shopping, and discovery experiences to the lock screens of smartphone devices. As such, Glance has been one of InMobi’s most profitable business lines.
6. What are the biggest lessons entrepreneurs can learn from InMobi’s journey?
Inmobi’s success highlights the importance of adapting to changing market conditions, making tough strategic pivots when necessary, thinking global from day 1, and investing in tech-enabled disruption to build sustainable competitive advantage.
7. How large is InMobi today?
InMobi is operating in over 150 countries, serving over 30000 brands for advertising from every industry, followed by over 2 billion users globally, and has about 2500 employees, making it one of the largest independent AdTech companies globally.
