In this article, we bring you the Inmobi startup story – the first unicorn from India. The concept of tackling mobile advertising from India was an alien idea during the 2000s. The concept itself was unknown to the country and the challenges ahead were unimaginable. InMobi was established against all odds in the year 2007. Even though venture capital was extremely difficult and challenging to get and most of the investors were quite skeptical when it came to the concept of a mobile advertising company from India, the establishment of InMobi required a lot of passion from its founders and a futurist c vision.
InMobi is a mobile advertising and discovery platform backed by Soft Bank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. InMobi has a reach of 1.5 billion customers and provides a data centric ability to discover new products and services by providing contextual and personalized advertising experiences on mobile phones.
Having being established in 2007, the Company has around 20 offices world over. The organization has received various awards and recognition over the years and some of the most notable ones are:
- 2013: Recognized on the MIT Technology Review’s 50 Disruptive Company’s List
- 2014: Forbes India Leadership Award for ‘Outstanding Start Up’
- 2016: Named Number 15th on the Fast Company’s list of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies”
- 2016: Featured in ‘India’s Top 100 Companies to Work For 2016’ by Economic Times – Great Places To Work Institute
- 2018: InMobi named on CNBC Disruptor 50 list
- 2018: InMobi named one among Fast Company- The World’s Most Innovative Companies, 2018
- 2019: InMobi named on CNBC Disruptor 50 list
- InMobi is also India’s first unicorn which has attained the status in 2011.
The Story behind InMobi
Mr. Naveen Tewari, Mr. Abhay Singhal, Mr. Amit Gupta and Mr. Mohit Saxena popularly known as “The Boys with a PPT” started off with their Entrepreneurial journey in 2007 in the Financial Capital of India, Mumbai, against all odds. InMobi was born and was founded as mKhoj, which was an SMS based monetization business. InMobi started with 8 people and just within a year it became a 50 employee organization with four offices across the world. The founders had the ability to think big and long and had tremendous abilities to capture nascent markets. As a result, in no time InMobi made its presence across the globe within a year. The very next year, 2009, mKhoj was rechristened as InMobi. The quick and prompt realization by the founders with regard to the extreme potential in the mobile advertising business contributed towards the birth of InMobi.
In the year 2010, InMobi made its entry into the land of opportunities; the United States of America with the sole intention to challenge the world’s biggest advertising market by threatening the status quo in the industry. The founders had a dream of making InMobi a truly global Indian Company and in the process they faced serious challenges and rejection. Almost every Venture Capitalist rejected the idea and when faced with a serious situation they ultimately were successful in convincing Ram Shriram of Sherpalo and got Funding of around $8 Million from Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.
This saw the birth of the dream of making InMobi a truly Global Indian Company. There was no stopping ahead post the realization of the Dream. Very next year, 2011, Mr. Naveen Tiwary was named amongst the World’s 50 most influential executives in Mobile content; a list that boasts of other business heads and stalwarts from Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, etc. In the same year, it acquired Sprout, an organization that used to offer a user friendly platform for building HTML based advertising. This platform was later relaunched as InMobi Studio and it helped big organizations to create award winning rich media based advertisement experiences. 2011 also witnessed the birth of India’s first B2B unicorn company.
SoftBank invested $200 Million in InMobi. They recognized InMobi’s immense capability and hard work in retaining and acquiring the best talents globally. In 2013 InMobi acquired Overlay Media, an expert in context aware computing. This acquisition helped InMobi to be the leader in providing highly engaging content to its consumers, globally. Recognition followed during the same year when it was recognized by MIT Technology as one of the 50 most Disruptive Companies. It was the only Indian Company to make that list and also the only advertising technology company in the World mentioned in the list.
In 2014, InMobi exchange was launched. It was the World’s first mobile buying and selling platform and the first exchange to support buying native advertisements. This launch was powered by Rubicon Project. 2015 witnessed the launch of the organizational culture, YaWiO, which means to Dream Big, Unite Passionately and Taking complete ownership of your actions. During the same year, InMobi became the only mobile advertising platform to reach 1 Billion plus unique mobile devices. The Discovery Platform, Miip was launched in 2015; a revolutionary commerce product which enabled consumers to discover, buy and experience products and services.
How InMobi works
InMobi runs an ad-network which connects advertisers with publishers to serve ads to consumers. Today, it handles over 15 billion transactions per day, and they expect that volume to quadruple over the next year. Their secret sauce is in how they add value for advertisers using ML. Each time a consumer visits one of their publisher’s platforms (i.e. an app or website), InMobi receives a packet of data about the consumer and the opportunity from the publisher. This data is fed through InMobi’s ML algorithms to assign a value to the opportunity for each advertiser based on a system which identifies similar customer profiles and their likelihood of engaging. That valuation decides the bid that each advertiser makes on the ad opportunity, and the winning bidder gets to serve their ad. All of this happens in real-time, and InMobi’s ML algorithms are constantly evolving to produce better results based on new data[3].
In the race to add the most value for advertisers, InMobi continues to invest in its technology to improve its valuation algorithms and ad-network. Their key investments include:
Detecting Publisher Fraud with ML: Following instances of publisher fraud in recent years (i.e. the Methbot Operation which generated fake ad views), InMobi invested in developing ML technology to detect fraud in their network. Reducing fraud increases the ROI for advertisers as fewer ads are wasted on fake viewers.
Ensuring Ad Quality: In March 2018 InMobi announced a partnership with advertising security experts at GeoEdge to help ensure only high quality advertisements are allowed in InMobi’s ad-network. This protects InMobi’s publishers by reducing the likelihood that offensive ads will be shown on their platforms.
Partnering with Microsoft: In June 2018, InMobi announced a partnership with Microsoft to collaborate on technology and go-to-market strategies[6]. In the long term, this partnership will allow InMobi to develop and scale new capabilities more quickly for their products.
Acquiring Pinsight Media: In October 2018, InMobi acquired Pinsight Media for its cutting-edge data management technology as well as its ability to distill marketing insights and profile customers using massive data sets[7]. In being able to provide marketing insights, InMobi wants to move up the marketing value chain from simply executing the advertising strategy to actually influencing it.
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Funding and Investments
The first round of funding of US$0.5 million InMobi (then mKhoj) was from Mumbai Angels in August 2006. After rebranding the company from mKhoj to InMobi, they received Series A funding of US$7.1 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2008, and Series B funding to the tune of US$8 million in 2010.
In 2011, the start-up raised US$200 million from Softbank. The investment was doled out in two tranches — US$100 million in 2011 and the rest in 2012.
Future Endeavors
Through its focus on innovation and operations, InMobi has become the largest independent ad network in the world. It has been the recipient of multiple awards (was among MIT Technology Review’s 50 most disruptive companies in 2013; Forbes’s Outstanding Startup of the year in India in 2014) . The mobile ad industry is currently dominated by the likes of Facebook and Google but InMobi has an opportunity to create a “third front” and break the dominance of the larger tech. companies.