InMobi raises $45 Mn in ongoing Series D round

Mobile advertising and discovery platform InMobi has raised $45 million for its flagship product Glance as a part of the larger round from US-based venture capital firm Mithril Capital.

As a part of the deal, Mithril’s co-founder Ajay Royan has joined the Glance board. Headquartered in Austin, the growth-stage investment firm handles $1.2 billion assets under management.

This is the first closure by the Bengaluru-based startup in its anticipated $75 million round. The fund will primarily go for expanding Glance into south-east Asia and adding more features to the product, including micro television episodes, location-based discovery and casual gaming.

Glance offers artificial intelligence-driven personalised content to the lock screens of smartphones. The company claims to have more than 50 million daily active users who spend 22 minutes per day on the platform.

Currently available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in India, Glance has partnered with about 1,000 media agencies along with smartphone makers such as Samsung, Xiaomi and Ginonee to pre-install Glance in their popular models. 

Just two months ago, InMobi had restructured its operations to give more autonomy to its matured business verticals. Now, the three subsidiaries are - advertising technology under InMobi UMC, data business TruFactor, and consumer content entity Glance.

Abhay Singhal, InMobi's co-founder, is the CEO of InMobi UMC whereas Piyush Shah heads TruFactor. After the rejig, Naveen Tewari, the Group CEO of InMobi, looks after Glance.

Apart from being an entrepreneur and founder of a Unicorn, Tewari has been a prolific investor and made some notable investments in last one decade including Mettl, Zappr, Razorpay, Indus OS, Woopl and VC firm Letsventure.

Last year, the Softbank-backed company was in the limelight after acquiring Los Angeles-based startup AerServ for $90 million in a cash and stock deal.