Back

Went to IIT Kanpur and built India's first startup unicorn company worth 12,000 CR. 1. Born to a father and a grandmother who were professors at IIT Kanpur, Naveen Tewari did not disappoint when he had the opportunity to study mechanical engineering at the same institution. After graduation, he landed the top job as a McKinsey consultant.🎓 2. As the son of a professor, Naveen did not stop studying and went to the prestigious Harvard Business School for an MBA. There, he learnt that India had 150 million smartphone users, but with just 20.7% penetration only. He wanted to do something about it. 🤔 3. He gathered his three IIT batchmates to build a service that would allow users to send SMS queries for news, weather, and sports and receive responses via SMS. He called it mKhoj and raised 2.5 CR. He thought he had it, but challenges came. 👇🏻 4. Text SMS could not be embedded with richer text formats, such as video ads or native content. No advertiser was interested in giving them money. Naveen had to pivot to a full-stack mobile advertising platform, and he did. In 2008, InMobi was born. 🚀 5. The idea was simple ⏩ Acquire publishers willing to embed their SDKs or serve ads and convince advertisers by the promise of mobile ads. Naveen started building SDKs and a real-time ad serving insight platform, AdROItTM. And this time the model worked. ✅ 6. With just 50 engineers, InMobi scaled to 4.5 CR (1 million dollars) in revenue, serving a feature phone audience and generating ad impressions in the hundreds of millions. It raised 28.3 CR in Series A funding and never looked back. 💰 7. By 2010, InMobi had scaled from 7.5 billion impressions to 16.9 billion in just five months. It had over 1.79 million users across 108 countries worldwide. As it launched in Japan, it continued to grow in the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. InMobi was a global name. 🌎 8. Growing by 251%, it had expanded to 350 employees, 47 billion monthly ad impressions and 3.4 CR customers. In September 2011, it raised 951 CR from Softbank and became a 4760 CR company. It became the first Indian startup to become a unicorn in 2011. 🦄 9. InMobi continued to expand into related consumer platforms for enhanced ad targeting, including Glance (an AI-driven lock-screen content discovery platform) and Roposo (a creator-led video commerce platform). Within just 2 years, Glance had also become a unicorn with 3 CR users globally. 🦄 10. Today, InMobi clocks a revenue of 2498 CR at a profit of 349 CR, with 324 CR coming from Glance alone. With clients like Coca-Cola and Toyota, it is valued at over 12,000 CR today. 📈 ➡️Who would have thought that a boy who wrote a letter to Steve Jobs of Apple in college would one day build a 12,000 CR company? 🙏 For more such inspiring stories, FOLLOW me here! 🔔