Naveen Tewari and the business of changing your mind

Naveen Tewari grew up in a place that offered a fairly persuasive answer to the question of what he should become. On the IIT Kanpur campus, professors were everywhere, including at home. His father, grandmother, uncle and aunt belonged to academia. Research and further study seemed a plausible route through life. Starting an advertising company was a considerable detour from the family syllabus.

He has described this upbringing as the opposite of an entrepreneurial environment. Yet it gave him a close view of people who worked with ideas. The break came in how those ideas might reach the world. As India’s corporate economy expanded in the 1990s, he began to consider a career beyond the university. After engineering at IIT Kanpur, he joined McKinsey.

Consulting put him close to decisions that reached far beyond a campus. He worked on a large Indian conglomerate’s entry into telecom and with technology-company management. Later came Charles River Ventures, where he helped develop an India investment strategy, and a brief stint with a Silicon Valley mobile VoIP startup. Before he had a company of his own, he had seen businesses from several sides of the table.

The credentials make the route look orderly in retrospect. They also help explain why leaving it was awkward. Every established institution on his résumé supplied an answer people could recognize. A new business would require him to explain himself all over again.

The student who took a hundred classmates home

At Harvard Business School, Tewari encountered entrepreneurs whose confidence interested him. They seemed absorbed in making something. He had already seen corporate ambition; now he was seeing the possibility of ownership. The distinction mattered to someone with a good chance of finding a comfortable job.

His own organizing instincts were visible before graduation. In the winter preceding his 2005 MBA, he managed IndiaTrek, taking more than 100 HBS students around India. The itinerary included business and political leaders, a software-industry symposium and high tea with the prime minister in New Delhi. It was a substantial exercise in making introductions, coordinating people and persuading an audience to see India differently.

Then the group visited his ancestral village. Some classmates returned interested in exploring how to help establish a school there. The trip helped earn him Harvard’s Dean’s Award. It also places his later education work in a useful context: the interest existed before the unicorn valuations.

Tewari went on to found and chair India School Fund, supporting schools in rural India. The connection between those two activities is easy to appreciate. A student trip had put a village and an international business-school class in the same conversation. His nonprofit work kept education in his life as his commercial interests moved elsewhere.

“I wanted a sense of ownership.”

Naveen Tewari, 2008

The mattress years

In 2007, Tewari and fellow founders Amit Gupta, Abhay Singhal and Mohit Saxena began mKhoj. Its original business was SMS search and monetization. The phone was the right object to pay attention to. The first service built around it would need revision.

The change in his circumstances was less abstract. As a consultant visiting Mumbai, he had stayed at the Taj. As a founder, he recalled sleeping on a mattress in an empty room. He had the option of returning to McKinsey, but wanted to build something he could call his own. “I wanted a sense of ownership,” he said in 2008.

There is a temptation to polish the mattress into a founding relic. It is more useful as a reminder of the transaction he had made: familiar comfort exchanged for an uncertain business. A consulting résumé can open doors. It cannot supply customers for an SMS search engine.

The pivot and renaming came in 2009. mKhoj became InMobi, pursuing mobile advertising. In 2010 it entered North America; in 2011 it launched a mobile advertising subsidiary in China. Within a few years, the founders had changed both the proposition and the map. The early idea had given them a start, rather than instructions for the rest of their careers.

Going east to get west

Tewari’s early explanation of international expansion was practical. Emerging markets had large populations, growing mobile use and less competition. For many consumers, a handset would be their first screen, sometimes their only one. InMobi began by building its position there, then moved toward more developed markets.

That sequence gave it something useful when it entered the United States. American publishers already had audiences outside America. InMobi’s work in those other markets made it a more relevant partner. Geography became a commercial advantage rather than an apology about where the company had been founded.

The argument sounds straightforward today, when an Indian software product can reasonably expect foreign customers. For a young company, it meant spending scarce resources outside the most familiar market. Tewari was learning that a larger ambition could sometimes produce a more workable business.

In 2011, SoftBank committed to an investment totaling $200 million. The commitment comprised $100 million in September 2011 and another $100 million in April 2012. InMobi crossed a billion-dollar valuation and became India’s first unicorn. The label made the company easier to explain at dinner. The underlying achievement was a technology product built in India that had found a market across borders.

The neighbors were part of the hiring process

By 2013, Tewari was talking publicly about an obstacle absent from most market-sizing spreadsheets: the neighbors. A graduate’s parents, he observed, had to tell people where their child worked. An established company supplied a respectable answer. A startup still trying to establish its name required a longer conversation.

His point was about the social cost of risk. The engineer choosing a small company carried more than a salary calculation into the decision. Family expectations and the prestige of a recognizable employer came along too. Building the business meant making its future credible to people who would never write its code.

That helps explain why Tewari returns to the idea of building global products from India. It expands the set of careers that can appear reasonable. In 2013, IIT Kanpur recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award for entrepreneurship. The campus that had suggested an academic future was now recognizing the route he took away from it.

He also became an investor in startups including Razorpay, NestAway and Mettl, and co-founded iSPIRT, the software-product think tank. These connections extend his involvement beyond his own companies. A founder who once needed others to take a chance on an unfamiliar name was now helping other unfamiliar names get started.

A business on the other side of the glass

InMobi served advertisers and publishers. With Glance, founded in 2019, Tewari moved toward a direct relationship with consumers. The product used the lock screen to present content without asking a person to open another app. A familiar piece of the handset became a place to discover something.

The change was also a shift in his position. Supplying advertising infrastructure and choosing what appears in front of a consumer involve different decisions. Glance would have to earn attention through the experience itself. The lock screen is a small space, but it sits remarkably close to everyday behavior.

Mithril Capital backed Glance; Google announced its investment in December 2020, when Glance became a unicorn. Google described an interest in localized content across Indian languages. In February 2022, Jio Platforms announced a $200 million investment. The second business brought Tewari into partnerships with companies that already had substantial relationships with phone users.

His account of its origin emphasizes wanting to work on a larger canvas while reworking InMobi. That is revealing. He was prepared to alter an existing business and begin a consumer venture alongside it. The attraction was a different kind of product, with a different relationship to the person holding the phone.

The shop window learns your face

The next change arrived with Glance AI. In February 2025, Glance and Google Cloud announced a partnership using models including Gemini and Imagen. On May 22, Glance launched its standalone AI commerce app worldwide on Android and iOS, beginning with fashion.

The proposed experience starts with an uploaded image or selfie. It generates styled looks showing the user, then connects those images to products that can be bought. Tewari’s ambition is to make discovery begin with an image of a possibility, before the shopper has decided on a search term.

A conventional catalogue asks you to imagine yourself in the clothes. Here, the software attempts some of that imagining for you. Whether the suggestion is useful depends on more than a convincing picture: the products must suit the shopper, be available and justify the purchase. The distance between an interesting demonstration and a shopping habit remains the commercial test.

InMobi had already secured $100 million in debt financing from MARS Growth Capital in September 2024 to support AI development and potential acquisitions. That financing is distinct from the earlier equity investments. It shows the resources being committed to the next stage, while leaving the outcome open. Tewari has changed the proposal again; customers will decide what it is worth.

On September 30, 2026, Glance announced another step: personalized shopping through Siri AI on iPhone and iPad. The proposed voice entry point lets people ask for shopping suggestions in their own words. It is a further attempt to meet shoppers inside an interface they already use, instead of asking them to begin with a separate destination.

Trust, cricket and an unfinished innings

For all the changes in products, his comments about people have a consistent theme. In 2025 he described a workplace that relied on trust rather than strict work hours and elaborate rules. His reasoning was that a company should avoid designing everyone’s day around the small minority who might abuse its flexibility. “We trust our people,” he said.

The idea is easier to understand alongside the long tenure he reported among senior colleagues. Trust requires familiarity, and familiarity takes time. It also gives his public persona an interesting tension: he advocates fast change in the business while valuing continuity among the people doing the changing.

In a conversation published in March 2026, he said InMobi teams were releasing products in 48 to 72 hours using AI-assisted workflows. He also returned to an earlier personal ambition: “I wanted to be a cricketer.” He had worked at it, then concluded that his ability fell short of the level required professionally.

That admission is a pleasingly ordinary detail in a career often told through valuations. He had wanted something, assessed his chances and found another field for his effort. The same willingness to reconsider runs through mKhoj, InMobi and Glance. His latest ambition puts AI between a shopper and a purchase. The next useful answer will come from watching what people actually choose. Even a founder with two unicorns still has to wait for that.