According to eMarketer, worldwide digital ad spending will reach $223.74 billion in 2017. Mobile will account for 63.3% of digital in 2017 and is expected to grow to a 77.1% share of digital in 2021. InMobi is an Indian Billion Dollar Unicorn that has recently achieved profitability in this sector.

InMobi’s Journey

InMobi was founded in 2007 by IIT Kanpur alumni Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, and their friend Mohit Saxena. After getting his engineering degree and while working at Citifinancial, Amit realized that he did not want to be a software engineer but rather wanted to help businesses implement business IT systems. Within a few years, Amit left his job, set up a company within the business intelligence space. He along with Naveen then went on to set up mKhoj, a SMS-based mobile search venture in Mumbai.

At the end of 2007, the founders pivoted the business model to lean toward mobile advertising. After shifting to the new business model, InMobi crossed $1 million in 2007. In 2008, it expanded to Indonesia and revenue grew to $1.5 million. In 2009, it expanded to Europe and other countries and saw 10x growth.

Today, InMobi offers mobile advertising solutions for leading brands, developers, and publishers. It has a reach of over 1.5 billion unique mobile devices and is used by over 20,000 global advertisers. Its headquarter is now in Singapore and has about 1,000 employees in its offices in India, Indonesia, UK, France, China, UAE, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Australia, and US. For more on the entrepreneurial journey, read my interview with Amit or listen to the 1Mby1M roundtable in May 2015.

Its suite of products aims to simplify mobile advertising for brands. Its Native ad platform lets users design ads and choose ad layouts best suited for their apps. InMobi Ad SDK is a monetization platform that enables developers to monetize sites and apps with ads. InMobi Studio enables faster creation of mobile rich media ads across multiple platforms for both mobile and tablet devices.