With 150 mln Indian users, Glance eyes U.S., LatAm

InMobi-backed consumer internet company Glance is gearing up for an international expansion, spanning the U.S. and Latin America over the next few quarters. The company—which owns lock screen content platform Glance and video app Roposo—says in a recent interaction with Fortune India that it was also exploring opportunities in the Middle East and Africa, and other markets with a strong adoption of Android phones.

Outside of India, Glance is already present in Southeast Asia, where it has an estimated 25 million active users. A majority of this is in Indonesia, where it serves content in Bahasa, besides English, followed by countries such as Thailand, Philippines, and Malaysia. With a view to foster deeper engagement from users in these markets, Glance has recently introduced content in Thai. It is also looking to launch localized lock screen content in other Southeast and South Asian languages, such as Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese, Nepali, Sinhala.

“We launched Glance in Southeast Asia in 2020, and as we speak, we are working with various telecom companies, and handset manufacturers, to launch in the U.S. and Latin America. In the U.S., we are looking to provide a different experience, with more Live sports, and Live commerce, which is a huge area we are investing in,” says Piyush Shah, president and chief operating officer, Glance. “Eventually, we want to get to a billion devices,” Shah adds. Currently, Glance is embedded in close to 300 million devices.

The company says that it has been able to expand its base so far through strategic partnerships with smartphone manufacturers, which enables them to be present on the lock screens of Android phones such as Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi and Oppo. This strategy—the company says—has helped to bring down the cost of customer acquisition for Glance. According to a recently published report by tech research firm Counterpoint Research, Glance currently has 150 million active users in India.

"Our unique go to market strategy has been to not spend money on user acquisition to drive installs, but instead to work deeply with the top handset manufacturers, on the technology, and the experience, to embed the Glance lock screen experience into the OS and make it seamless for the user. We have taken a couple of years to ensure that the experience is something consumers like, given that the lock screen is the most premium and interacted with real estate on the device,” Shah says.

The Google and Mithril Capital funded company recently launched Glance LIVE—a live streaming offering which aims to bring real time, celebrity and influencer driven content to the lock screen.