MOST STARTUP FOUNDERS aspire for unicorn status for their ventures. Naveen Tewari, founder & CEO of the InMobi Group, was the first one to get it in India; and he achieved unicorn status for another of his brands some 10 years later. What sets him apart is the fact that many of his former employees have also founded successful ventures. Among these is Meesho, a unicorn.

While Tewari ushered in the trend of unicorns in India, currently his energies are concentrated on AI. In May, Glance — a screen lock discovery platform that is a subsidiary of the InMobi Group — unveiled its AI version. In its new avatar, it acts as your personal stylist — just click a selfie and answer a few questions. Once set up, Glance will recommend styles by dressing you up in various outfits — albeit virtually — and also let you shop for the look. With millions spent on its development, the company has also struck a long-term deal with Google (also one of its leading investors) to scale its AI infrastructure using the American tech giant’s DeepMind and Gemini. Tewari feels that the move has set InMobi up for the future. That’s a long way for a company that started operations in Mumbai in 2007 as mKhoj, an SMS-based search engine.

Tewari, 47, was raised on the IIT Kanpur campus, where his grandmother and father were professors. He went on to graduate from the institute, before arming himself with an MBA from Harvard. He is candid when asked why he chose to become an entrepreneur. “You are expecting a very logical answer, but a large portion of this is illogical, gut-based. So, to give you a very good why, or what, would be me making things up to a certain extent,” he says.

Be that as it may, Tewari has always been the first to spot trends, and his ideas have often been ahead of their time — so much so that he struggled to raise money from investors in India!

STARTINGUP

Let us look at how it all started. Tewari, with his IIT Kanpur mates Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal, got together with Mohit Saxena — an engineer from IIT Roorkee — to set up mKhoj in Mumbai. It started operations in a 300 sq. ft kholi (room) above an auto repair shop in Vile Parle East in 2007. (Piyush Shah, a Delhi College of Engineering graduate with an MBA from ISB, joined as co-founder in 2009.)

Soon, the founders decided to explore the adtech space, with the company morphing into InMobi in 2008. At a time when India had no history of unicorns or of home-grown global product companies, the InMobi founders bet on technology to build a platform that would change the way third-party advertising was done on mobile devices, just as smartphones were getting popular.

“I think we were crazy… We were crazy about it to say, ‘we’ll see what happens’. The worst case [scenario], if it fails, we may find a job,” says Tewari.

The reason they got into the adtech space was based on the assumption that mobile internet would take off in India before it did in the U.S., given the high cost of PCs here. “We could not fathom [the fact] that mobile internet is going to go crazy in the U.S. So, we were wrong in one aspect of our logic,” says Tewari.

But they did assume correctly the potential change that mobile internet would bring to the world. With mobile internet exploding in the West and devices being more affordable there, the founders decided to build a global firm. Having raised $500,000 in an angel round from Mumbai Angels in 2007, they set out to raise more money. But no Indian investor bought the business model.

The founders then decided to tap U.S. investors. While they were convinced about the idea, what needed convincing was funding a product company from India that was looking to serve the American market. Finally, InMobi raised Series A funding of $7.1 million from U.S. venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Beyers and Sherpalo Ventures in 2008 and moved to Bengaluru from Mumbai.

Tewari recalls landing their first client. In those days, Gupta went door to door, finally cracking a deal with Diageo. “I think Amit [Gupta] promised them the world. We didn’t know then if we could deliver… But they were happy with us,” says Tewari.

In 2010, InMobi raised $8 million from the same investors in a Series B round. By then, it had clients such as Reebok, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Quaker Oats, Yamaha, Barclays, and Yahoo! on board. It also had a footprint in the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa and was looking to enter Japan.

UNICORN STATUS

The next challenge was getting people to join the company. Tewari says in the initial years, they interviewed anyone who wanted to join. “We would never interview anybody in our office, because nobody would join us if they came to our office,” he chuckles. The founders would interview prospective candidates at coffee shops in five-star hotels. “[We would] act as if we were already there for some other meeting and adjust the interview to fit into our busy schedules.”

That didn’t help much. Maybe one in 22 people they interviewed joined, says Tewari. Eventually they managed to get 80-100 people to join.

But retaining them was another challenge. Tewari recalls the first time InMobi held a press conference. The young employees they had recruited complained that they were finding it difficult to get married, since their prospective partners and families had never heard of InMobi! The founders hired a PR firm in Mumbai, which organised the presser. It earned InMobi a front-page mention in a leading daily.

In FY11, InMobi hit the milestone of a $100 million in revenue. Tewari says it was an ‘inflection point’. “The moment we reached $100 million, we knew we had arrived,” says Tewari. “So that just completely changed us in a way, where we wanted to think very big about our ambition.”

And to fuel the ambition came the boost in 2011 from Japanese tech giant SoftBank, which committed to a $200-million investment. This took the company’s valuation to $1 billion, making it India’s first unicorn.

In early 2015, when InMobi was valued at around $2 billion, there was buzz that Google was looking to acquire it. Tewari admits that there were a bunch of contenders, and that discussions did take place. In the end the founders decided not to sell. “We realised that… we’d hit on something big… We didn’t see what was being offered to us (money)… [as] something that we couldn’t get to ourselves.”

In 2015-16 the company carried out a cost rationalisation exercise, and announced that it had turned profitable in the October-December quarter of 2016.

Today InMobi competes with tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Amazon, among others, in the adtech space. According to research and market intelligence firm Mordor Intelligence, the size of the global online advertising market was estimated at $285.96 billion in 2025, and is expected to reach $478.61 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 10.85% over the next five years.

STARTUP LESSONS

In 2019, InMobi launched Glance, partnering with large Android smartphone players. The platform enabled content across news, sports, gaming, apps, and shopping. The pivot to Glance was a strategic move, says Tewari. While the company had successfully cracked the adtech space, success had been elusive in the consumer tech space.

“You [may] build something nice… [but if] the consumer doesn’t like it, it could fail,” Tewari says, recalling earlier failed attempts in 2012 and 2015.

In 2019, the company restructured itself by creating a holding company called InMobi Group, along with three subsidiaries: InMobi Marketing Cloud, which houses its media and software business; Glance; and Trufactor, a data and intelligence firm (now integrated into the InMobi marketing division). For Glance, the founders raised $45 million from PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital as part of a larger round of $75 million-plus for its growth. As a result, Glance became a unicorn within two years of it coming into existence.

What sets the InMobi founders apart is that they are like one big family. Tewari says it is the ability to agree to disagree but commit to each other’s views that makes their bonding rare. “I have not seen ego coming between us… We’ll fight, and then we’ll go for dinner.”

And since the founders are like family, they have supported each other. For instance, when Gupta co-founded his own venture — shared electric mobility platform Yulu — in 2017, it worked out of InMobi’s offices for over a year.

While Tewari dreamt of becoming a professional sportsman when he was young, he gave up the idea once he realised he wasn’t in the top 1%. That by no means has diminished his love for sports. “It’s hard to play sports because it is a team game. Now I am into individual activities that give me the freedom to do them anywhere in the world.”

For the self-confessed workaholic who believes that his passion for InMobi, which is gearing up for an IPO, makes the work as good as a leisure activity, Tewari says there have been times when he has gotten bored on holiday. His daughter was born around the time when he founded the company, and he credits his family for supporting him. “My family has been hugely supportive, taking care of things where, ideally, I should have been present.”

What makes Tewari and InMobi unique is the multiplier effect it has had on Indian entrepreneurship. Nearly 50-odd InMobi employees have gone solo with their ideas, including Mukesh Kalra and Santosh Navlani (ET Money), Vidit Aatrey (Meesho), and Atul Satija (The/Nudge Institute). And that’s a hard act to beat.