InMobi

Last updated

InMobi
FormerlymKhoj
Company type Private
Industry
Founded2007;17 years ago (2007) [1]
Founder
  • Naveen Tewari
  • Mohit Saxena
  • Amit Gupta
  • Abhay Singhal
[2]
Headquarters
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Piyush Shah (Co Founder of InMobi Group and President & COO, Glance) [3]
  • Marc Steifman (CFO)
Products
RevenueIncrease2.svg₹589 crore (US$71 million) (FY23) [4]
Increase2.svg₹113 crore (US$14 million) (FY23) [4]
Number of employees
2,500 [5]
Website inmobi.com

InMobi (formerly mKhoj) is an Indian multinational technology company, based in Bangalore. [6] [7] [8] Its mobile-first platform allows brands, developers and publishers to engage consumers through contextual mobile advertising. [9] The company was founded in 2007 under the name mKhoj by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. [10]

Contents

In 2008, it was enhanced from SMS-based services to mobile advertising and rebranded as InMobi. In 2011, InMobi became the first Indian unicorn startup company. [11] It has 22 offices in 12 countries across 5 continents and employs around 2,500 people. [12] [13]

The company is backed by Soft Bank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Ram Shriram's Sherpalo Ventures. [9] [14] It raised a total of US$215.6 million in three rounds of funding – US$0.5 million in 2007, US$7.1 million in Series A funding in 2008, US$8 million in Series B funding in 2010, US$200 million in Series C funding in 2011. [9]

History

InMobi started in 2007, when it was known as mKhoj (mobile khoj), providing SMS-based search engine services. [12] Started by the four founders out of a residential apartment in Bangalore, it has since grown into one of India's first unicorn companies. [15] The founders later felt the need to rebrand to InMobi as the company shifted focus from mobile search to mobile advertising. "InMobi" was also thought to be easier to pronounce in English as compared to mKhoj – which is a derivative of the Hindi word for "search". [16] The company initially operated in emerging markets in Asia and Africa, before expanding to the US in 2009. [17]

Financing

The first round of funding of US$500 000 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. [18]

In 2011, the start-up raised US$200 million from Softbank Group. The investment was doled out in two tranches — US$100 million in 2011 and the rest in 2012. [19]

Acquisitions and partnerships

Mobile advertising

The primary focus of InMobi has been on mobile advertising. The company's platform aims to bring together publishers and advertisers to provide relevant, personalised and contextual advertisements to a user visiting the mobile app or website. [9]

Since the company's switch from an SMS-based search engine to an advertising platform, they have made several product announcements. The company started with simple text-based ads and has moved to include other ad formats such as video and native ads, including conventional ad formats such as interstitial and banner ads. The company also provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for mobile app creators who wish to integrate InMobi's advertising within their app. [40]

In 2014, InMobi launched their native advertising and interactive video advertising platforms. [41]

InMobi has tied up with over 30,000 app developers, across verticals of gaming, social, news, utility, entertainment among others to help them monetize their apps using mobile advertising. [42]

Native advertising

InMobi launched their native advertising platform in 2014. Native advertising mimics the environment in which the ad is displayed thereby making it less intrusive to the end consumer.

Several advertising players had been increasing their focus on native ads to preserve the user experience on publishers’ websites and mobile apps by mimicking the environment in which they're displayed. This form of advertising also curtails the adoption of ad blockers as the ads are unobtrusive. [43]

InMobi features 80 of the top 100 AdAge brands on their network, through which it provides a huge database for publishers to use their native advertising platform to monetise users. [44]

Discovery-commerce, re-marketing and Miip

InMobi launched a new platform called Miip in 2015. The platform brought together advertisers and publishers in a bid to spark excitement among online shoppers. It also enabled them to discover new products using the concept of re-marketing. [45]

The remarketing platform enables app developers and marketers to retarget existing users across InMobi's global ad network and exchange by implementing a mobile growth strategy across the entire conversion funnel. The remarketing platform helps advertisers nudge users to make their first purchase, re-target existing users to drive incremental sales and re-activate dormant mobile users. [46]

Awards and recognition

Criticism

According to sources, InMobi laid off approximately 10 per cent of its workforce in April 2016, due to the company reeling under losses of US$45.5 million in 2014-15 and US$40.91 million in 2015–16 in a bid to show profitability. [18] The company also saw major attrition in their senior management during this phase. [56]

InMobi has refuted the claims, by stating that they added 184 full employees in 2016 and their voluntary attrition rates are lower than the industry average with 80% of the executive team at InMobi has an average tenure of more than four years. [57]

See also

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