Origin Story
The apartment that became a unicorn
Four friends from IIT Kanpur. One apartment in Mumbai. Zero investors.
In 2007, Abhay Singhal, Naveen Tewari, Amit Gupta, and Mohit Saxena walked away from the kind
of careers that make parents proud - steady, predictable, respectable - and began building what
would become India's first billion-dollar startup.
The first idea was mKhoj, an SMS-based search engine for mobile users. It was the right instinct
- mobile was going to eat the world - but the wrong product. The team pivoted, rebuilt, and
rebranded as InMobi: a mobile advertising platform for a world that didn't quite know yet that
it needed one.
"We knew mobile phones would become dominant. We just had to build the infrastructure to match that reality."
Twenty rejections from Indian venture capitalists later, the founding team made a decision that
reads like a startup parable: they flew to San Francisco on maxed-out credit cards to pitch
Silicon Valley directly. The gamble paid off. A meeting with KPCB - Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers - broke the streak. InMobi had its funding, and the clock started running.
The Business
Running the world's mobile ad machine
Abhay Singhal has held three different executive titles at InMobi - Chief Revenue Officer,
Head of Human Resources, and CEO of InMobi Advertising. That last combination - revenue and
people, before CEO - is unusual enough to be a tell. He understands both the numbers and the
humans behind them.
As CEO of InMobi Advertising, he oversees a platform that reaches 1.3 billion people
across more than 190 countries, serving 80 billion ad impressions every day.
The company's global business spans China, APAC, and the United States.
Under his leadership as CRO, InMobi earned its place on both the CNBC Disruptor 50 and
Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies lists.
His particular obsession is AI's role in creative advertising. The cost of generating
high-quality ad creative has collapsed - from dollars per asset to cents - and Singhal believes
this finally makes personalized advertising at scale possible, not just theoretically but
commercially. InMobi's self-service Buyer Hub is built on exactly that premise:
democratizing precision tools for mid-sized advertisers who couldn't previously afford them.
"AI has lowered the cost of generating high-quality creative assets from multiple dollars to mere cents - making the 'right creative, right person, right time' aspiration finally real."
Glance & the Next Frontier
The lock screen is not just a lock screen
InMobi's most audacious bet isn't the ad network. It's Glance - the world's first lock screen
content platform, launched in 2019 as a sister company. Singhal describes the idea simply:
the lock screen is the most-seen real estate on any smartphone, and nobody was doing anything
interesting with it.
Glance now runs on 300 million+ active devices and is growing fast.
In 2025, it launched an AI-native commerce platform for Samsung smartphones in the US,
bringing hyper-personalized shopping discovery to the moment before you even unlock your phone.
Glance's valuation reached $1.8 billion. The lock screen, it turns out, is a very good place
to sell things.
Singhal frames the opportunity in terms of surfaces - the moments and screens through which
consumers experience the digital world. Phones, tablets, TVs, lock screens, wearables:
in his view, the advertising industry hasn't yet reckoned with how many of these surfaces
exist, or how valuable they are.
The IPO
India's first unicorn, heading public
In late 2024, InMobi's founders made a move that signaled confidence in where the company
was headed. They raised $350 million in debt financing from Värde Partners,
Elham Credit Partners, and SeaTown Holdings - and used it to buy back SoftBank's stake.
Founder ownership climbed above 60%. This is the kind of housekeeping you do when you're
getting ready to ring a bell.
By early 2026, InMobi had engaged eight investment banks - including JP Morgan, Jefferies,
Kotak Mahindra Capital, and UBS - to advise on an IPO targeting at least $500 million at a
$4-5 billion valuation. The story of a Mumbai apartment that became India's first unicorn is
about to get a public market chapter.
Singhal received IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 - the university's
acknowledgment that one of its own had done something worth pointing at.
In 2018, the Economic Times named him one of India's 40 most influential young business
leaders. Neither accolade seems to have slowed him down.
