Award: Outstanding Startup
InMobi
A global mobile advertising network, founded by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta and Mohit Saxena
Education: Three of them graduated from IIT-Kanpur, one from IIT-Roorkee. Tewari did his MBA from Harvard Business School
Why the company won this award: InMobi has become the number one independent mobile advertising company. It taps into 800 million mobile users every month in 165 countries. It got revenues of about $200 million in 2013, and three rounds of funding (totaling $215.6 million)
In 2007, a startup almost collapsed within six months of inception. The four co-founders—friends who had either given up well-paying jobs or quit their own ventures to launch this company—became acquainted with the bitter taste of failure. Its business model had one fault line too many, and funds ran dry.
It could have been an unknown death for yet another startup. But Naveen Tewari (now 37) and his friends were not willing to see their company, mKhoj, become a doomed statistic. They went back to the drawing board, changed their business model and resuscitated their dying venture. That very year, mKhoj was reborn as InMobi.
Headquartered in Bangalore, InMobi has positioned itself as the go-to company in the mobile advertising business: It provides traditional advertising solutions, mobile app analytics, consumer insights to advertisers and other related services. It has tied up with 36,000 web publishers, including gaming sites, to enable brands and app developers to seamlessly integrate their products into mobile content.
It has emerged as one of the world’s largest independent (it does not own a social media platform) mobile ad networks, engaging 800 million consumers every month across 165 countries. Having developed its proprietary cloud-based technology to deploy mobile ads with the click of a button, InMobi allows clients to remotely publish their ads on sites and apps of their choice. Its roster of clients includes Indian media houses Network 18 (publisher of Forbes India) and NDTV, international brands like Macy’s and Lancôme Paris, and Japanese videogame developer Sega.
The accolades haven’t stopped pouring in. It was recognised by MIT Technology Review as one of the ‘50 Disruptive Companies of 2013’.
“We want to become one of the top 10 internet companies in the world by 2020,” says Tewari, CEO, InMobi. Co-founders Amit Gupta (38), Abhay Singhal (34) and Mohit Saxena (39, and vice president, technology) are also driven by this need to prove that their company can take on behemoths such as Facebook and Google.
For now, it’s on the right track: InMobi clocked revenues of $200 million last year, and expects to finish this December at $250 million. Its margins are a healthy 40 percent compared to the five to 10 percent margins in the television and print ad industry.
But the climb to the top has been an arduous journey filled with missteps, frustration and near defeat.
Of Dreams and Hope, Dashed
In late 2006, IIT-Kanpur alumni Tewari, Gupta and Singhal, along with Saxena (from IIT-Roorkee), came together to develop a mobile search company that used text messages, or SMSes, to update subscribers on local information such as neighbourhood vendors, lucrative deals and sales. They were so convinced by the brilliance of their idea that Saxena quit his job with Virgin Mobile USA to return to India. But mKhoj found no traction among investors.
Undeterred, the founders dipped into their personal savings, maxed out their credit cards and finally stopped taking salaries.
For Tewari, it looked like yet another failed startup: He had unsuccessfully tried to launch two ventures while completing his MBA at Harvard Business School.
“[At the time] we were very confident about our idea. People need information about deals in their city, and will happily pay for an SMS. We got an initial seed funding of $500,000 from Mumbai Angels. We felt we had cracked it. And then, boom, we crashed,” says Tewari.
Their understanding of the Indian consumer had missed out on a critical piece of the puzzle: “The team had failed to take into account the cultural aspect of India, where every individual on the road is a source of high quality [mostly user-friendly] information,” writes Tewari on the company’s blog. His search-based listing model, which was along the lines of the daily deal website Groupon, could not displace the power of word-of-mouth communication.
In San Francisco, he began cold-calling possible investors. Within a fortnight, he got Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Ram Shriram, who heads the VC company Sherpalo Ventures, to jointly invest $7.1 million in InMobi. The meeting with them ended in 40 minutes flat. Tewari remembers walking out of the building in a daze. “I drove aimlessly for two hours in San Francisco’s Bay Area. It was astonishing,” he says. His eyes moisten as he recollects that fortuitous day.
(This story appears in the 17 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Congratulations to the InMobi team! A truly inspiring story for all the young guns out there!
on Oct 10, 2014Liked the persistence, hardwork and love to your work, that in fact has grown you to this level.
on Oct 10, 2014