InMobi – Startup Story

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InMobi is a global advertising platform that aims to make mobile ads more user-friendly and less intrusive and impersonal.

Founder and CEO of mobile ad network giant, InMobi, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is an engineer by training, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked at consulting firm McKinsey. In between all that, Naveen also had some experience working in startups while he was in Silicon Valley. Naveen and his team started to dabble and among their first few projects was a VOIP application and also a chat application. But it was too early for the market back then.

The Bengaluru-based InMobi started off as mkhoj in Mumbai in 2007 by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. mKhoj is a derivative of the Hindi word for ‘search’. At that point, the business model aimed at solving the local information problem using SMS based search and worked on SMS based monetization as a revenue model which would eventually morph into an SMS Ad Network. Post that, the team saw the growing potential of the mobile web and the business model was taken back to the drawing board. This was the turning point in InMobi’s life, when the SMS based model was dropped. In 2008, it was enhanced from SMS-based services to mobile advertising and rebranded as InMobi. InMobi decided to become a mobile advertising network, where advertisers can display their ads on mobile internet sites. The idea was soon bought into by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield and Byers as well as Sherpalo Ventures and InMobi began its journey into the mobile web and advertising world. Today, InMobi is a global mobile ad network offering mobile web advertising solutions to its partners. InMobi helps advertisers reach their target consumers as they surf the internet on their mobile phones. In August 2011, InMobi acquired US-based mobile advertising solutions provider Sprout, which was backed by Polaris Partners. In July 2012, InMobi acquired MMTG Labs, a San Francisco-based start-up that operates Facebook apps marketplace Appbistro as well as white label app distribution platform AppGalleries. In Jan 2018, InMobi acquired Los Angeles based Aerserv for US$90 Million in cash and stock to create the world’s largest programmatic video platform for mobile publishers. In November 2019, InMobi’s Glance(the mobile content platform and part of the InMobi Group) acquires short video content platform Roposo.