InMobi, the poster boy of Indian start-ups, is pivoting from being an independent mobile advertising platform to becoming a global provider of enterprise platforms for marketers.
The Bengaluru-based company, which competes with Google and Facebook for data-driven mobile advertising, has developed its own software that it is selling to the enterprises. It now provides cloud-based intelligent mobile platforms for enterprise marketers.
“It is a massive transformation we are going through,” said Ravi Krishnaswamy, the chief technology officer at InMobi, in an interview. He said this transition was being built on InMobi’s existing core business of mobile ad-tech.
InMobi was backed by top investors, Japan’s SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google’s early investor Ram Shriram’s Sherpalo Ventures. It received an investment of $200 million from SoftBank in 2011, making it a ‘Unicorn’ or a start-up with a market cap of over $1 billion.
Formidable force
What is also helping InMobi in its transition is its strategic partnership with software maker Microsoft, which it announced in June this year. Mr. Krishnaswamy said that the company had built its software on top of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure. “Satya [Nadella] is very much involved with us. The idea is to innovate together at the research and development level and build the software together,” said Mr. Krishnaswamy, a former top Flipkart and Microsoft executive. “Microsoft has a huge hole when it comes to mobile ad-tech....their competition is Google and Salesforce... Now we are a formidable force [together].” he said.
Experts such as Rishikesha T. Krishnan, director and professor of strategy at the Indian Institute of Management in Indore, said it was clear a few years ago that competing with the likes of Google was not a sustainable strategy for InMobi. “Yet, the core technology platform had value to the right partners. InMobi has leveraged that well, particularly with Microsoft. Overall, a smart pivot in my view,” said Prof. Krishnan.
Research firm Forrester forecasts that digital marketing spends would increase to $118 billion by 2021 — up from its original projection of $103 billion by 2019. InMobi gets almost 50% of its revenue from the U.S market and about 25% from China. “This just sets us apart from our bigger competitors [such as] Google and Facebook [which] are not really present in China,” said Mr. Krishnaswamy.
InMobi is also transforming itself through acquisitions. In January this year, the company said that it had bought Los Angeles-based start-up AerServ for $90 million in a cash and stock deal. AerServ helps mobile publishers grow revenue through its ad mediation platform, and increase yield by delivering brand-based ads. In October, the company announced the acquisition of U.S.-based Pinsight Media, the mobile data and advertising company formerly wholly owned by U.S. carrier Sprint, for an undisclosed amount. The all-stock deal is part of a broader strategic partnership between InMobi and Sprint across devices, data, media and marketing.
Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO, InMobi, had started mobile search venture mKhoj from a single-bedroom Mumbai flat in 2007, collaborating with IIT alumni Amit Gupta, Mohit Saxena and Abhay Singhal. But the model failed and the team pivoted to create a mobile in-app ecosystem and rebranded the firm as InMobi.
In 2015, the company unveiled an artificial intelligence discovery platform, Miip, touted to be InMobi’s path to billion-dollar revenues. But the platform, which displayed ads to people about products and services that they actually want to buy, couldn’t create much impact on the market. Mr. Krishnaswamy, who declined to reveal the revenue of the company, said that the firm was profitable and it was “not that far off” to hit $1 billion in revenue.
