InMobi wants to create the largest advertising and marketing firm: CEO

With acquisition of Pinsight, we are part of this big boys' club of companies who own their data and run the advertising

For InMobi, the Bengaluru-headquartered mobile marketing and advertising platform, 2018 is proving to be a landmark year with two acquisitions and a much-hyped partnership with Microsoft. Backed by artificial intelligence-enabled software, data and insights, the company — one of the first few unicorns in the country in the software product space — is positioning itself as a mega software firm, challenging the dominance of global majors. Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive officer of InMobi, tells Bibhu Ranjan Mishra how the deals will shape the company’s future. Edited excerpts:

Why is the acquisition of Pinsight Media, the company you acquired from US telecom Sprint, so important for you?

Any company in the world that has a lot of data can create a massive advertising business. Facebook and Amazon are good examples of it. One of our biggest strategies at InMobi was to go and get that data, which is very pristine. Our alliance with Sprint is exactly that. Sprint’s biggest asset is its data, which was handled by its data and advertising unit, Pinsight. The use of this data makes advertising more intelligent. In fact, voice and data revenues are hitting the rock bottom for world telecom companies. The biggest reserves telecos have today is “data” to which everyone is trying to leverage to create a massive advertising business.

Mobile ad business is getting crowded with telecos such as AT&T, Verizon and even Amazon positioning as big competition to Google and Facebook. Where will InMobi fit in?

With this (acquisition of Pinsight), we are part of this big boys’ club of companies who own their data and run the advertising. If you look at the way we run our business today, while on one hand we work with the app developers, on the other, we have the advertisers who come to us seeking the real estate to run their advertising. While doing this (running the advertising), we also collect data from every app because our software are running inside those. But the scale at which we do is somewhat okay while the Pinsight acquisition will give us the real boost with the software as well as data.

How scalable is the platform?

Since Pinsight was managing Sprint’s users data, they have their own proprietary software, which understands the telecom data and get insights. Now, we can take this software out and work with any other telecom company. We are in talks with around five (telecos) and will announce those as they fructify. That is the big multiplier that this deal gives us, and that changes the play for us. We can play alongside the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, and AT&T. This is going to create billions of dollars of business.

Is 2018 kind of becoming a milestone year for you in terms of shaping the future?

This year, we have done two acquisitions. The first one is AerServ, which we acquired in January for $90 million, and then Pinsight which we are doing now. The acquisition of AerServ gave us the ability to bring the app developers closer to us. We have also done two partnerships — one with Microsoft and another with Sprint. The ties with Microsoft are extremely important for us because that gave us the capability to offer advertising and marketing software on Cloud, a space where companies such as Adobe and Salesforce were traditionally dominant. On top of that, Microsoft also offered to sell our software through its vast sales network.

Did this proposal come from Microsoft or it was your idea?

I met (Microsoft CEO) Satya Nadella in February 2017 over lunch when he was in Bengaluru. I had no idea about what’s in his mind. The meeting was just for half an hour, but the preliminary discussion happened there. We agreed on the concept and moved it forward fast.

Are you already seeing this (Microsoft) partnership yielding results?

It has been massively successful. The partnership was announced in June. I travel to Seattle at least once a month to personally look into it. The partnership is very important not only for us, even for Microsoft as well. They have allocated dedicated people to look after this partnership in every country. We have around 100 people who are working in this business unit.

There is a belief that Microsoft may look at investing in InMobi? Is there a scope for that?

They are a strategic partner. Capital is secondary for us. If the capital comes as part of any strategic partnership, it’s okay. But, we are not forging partnerships for the sake of raising fund as I don’t want to showcase my valuation to anyone.

What is the current valuation of InMobi?

We don’t have any new valuation numbers to share since we have not gone for any fresh funding. There is valuation attached to it (the Pinsight acquisition) but we don’t want to talk about it. Only thing I can tell you is that it’s very large. We don’t care about it as the potential of the business that we are talking about is of billions of dollars.

Are you looking for any fresh funding?

We are generating cash. So, I don’t need fresh funding just for running the business. But if I decide to do a large acquisition – may be half a billion dollars kind of acquisition — maybe we will go for it. Having said that, we are not a B2C company to do such large acquisitions. We will expand through partnerships. We will announce many more partnerships over the next three months. We are taking country-by-country approach, and looking at countries like the UK, India and Asia Pacific region for partnerships like this (Sprint).

Where do you see InMobi in the next five years?

In 2-3 years, we will share with you many things. The second half of this story will come in the next couple of months which is very massive. Those are the things we focus on. Our vision is very simple: to be the largest advertising and marketing company across media, software and data. We have built the whole business strategically all the way down. So what I can tell you that we will be a mega large software company. We are sure to double our scale and growth over the next two years.