Founded by Naveen Tewari, an IIT Kanpur alumni, in 2007, InMobi today is world’s second largest mobile advertising network, after Google.
InMobi, The Mobile Ad Network.
For a company that started off in a small room with ten employees seven years back, getting a $200 million contract within five years of functioning is nothing less than a meteoric rise.
Founded by Naveen Tewari, an IIT Kanpur alumni, in 2007, InMobi today is world’s second largest mobile advertising network, after Google.
While pursuing his higher studies at Harvard Business School, Naveen gained some experience in start-ups and entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs, he was very fascinated with the rapidly advancing internet.
While Naveen and his employees started to dabble on their first few projects, they realized that it was too early for a market then.
The smart phone market had just started evolving.
It was then when the team came up with ideas like providing fundamental services that ranged from mobile e-payments to advertising platforms. Focusing more on the advertising side of business mKhoj was found in 2007.
And mKhoj was later renamed to InMobi to reach the international audience in an easy way.
Tewari admits that he foresaw the advent of smart phones and e-business seven years back. “I felt that the market in mobile phones was just going to explode, it was going to go through the roof across the world”, he says. What we look as a disadvantage in a developing nation, he turned into a blockbuster. “Developing countries don’t have landline infrastructure or PC infrastructure, so they move very quickly to mobile infrastructure. The adoption rates being high in such countries, you capture the market very quickly and the market enlarges quickly too.”
The company, now based in Bangalore, had received an investment of $200 million from Japan’s SoftBank Corp. in 2011. Tewari, applied the reverse market strategy to his venture. Rather than entering the US and Europe markets first, they established leadership positions in Asia and Africa and then entered US and Europe.
Since then, InMobi has evolved to become an epitome of India’s fastest growing start up conglomerate, which includes only a handful of companies into the worth-billions category. Reaching more than 578 million users across 165 countries, the company’s approximate valuation in today’s date is approximately $2 billion.
They focused on building a global quality product from India that can be acknowledged. The company still grows at a fast pace.
Think big, think different and most importantly, never give up- is InMobi’s success mantra.
