 "Piyush Shah, co-founder, InMobi Group, and president and chief operating officer, Glance")
Adtech firm InMobi's lock screen platform Glance has set its eyes on hitting a base of one billion users by the end of 2025 globally, the company’s chief marketing officer (CMO) Bikash Chowdhury said on Thursday.
“We will continue to build on the scale. We are hoping to get to a billion users by 2025. The other one is in terms of how we are able to go deeper in the developed markets,” Chowdhury said. These markets would include Japan and the US.
The company currently has a global base of over 450 million users, whereas the active users in India are pegged at 235 million. In fact, during the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Cricket World Cup alone, the live score widget provided on the Glance Lock Screen attracted an impressive 3.5 million daily active users (DAUs).
“Japan and the US would be the new markets. Europe is another market that we are looking at, and it will pick up based on partnerships, specific markets to start with, and it will expand over a period of time,” he added.
Chowdhury elucidated that the company’s go-to-market strategy in international markets depends on factors such as scale, the number of Android users in a geography, and the economics of a particular user.
“If you think of an Android user in a developed market, that user is perhaps 10x to 20x more valuable than a market in South Asia. So, this is the third parameter which is critical since we are a business,” he added.
He said the company is focused on expanding on scale and in global markets before it breaks even.
“We are not in a hurry to get to profit in, let's say, the next three months or six months. We come from (a place) to understand that this business is going to be successful only if consumers love us. That’s what we are focused on,” he observed.
He added, “Do we have a breakeven goal that I can share with you? The answer is no. Right now, we are really looking at expanding and getting into tougher markets.”
According to the Glance Smart Lock Screen Trends Report India 2024, around 55 per cent of the users who accessed content on their mobile lock screens were from tier-1 cities, while tier-II and III cities are also fast catching up with a 45 per cent share.
The report also found that content served in regional languages received nearly 550 million glances from users on a daily basis. Notably, among the top 25 content pieces in the last year, 10 were regionally centered on subjects like news, movies, and local topics.
To date, Glance has raised $390 million in funding from major conglomerates such as Google and Reliance, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn.
In February 2022, the company raised $200 million from Jio Platforms, a digital unit of Reliance Industries. Similarly, in 2020, the company raised $145 million from Google.
Glance is a unicorn company part of the InMobi group valued at over $1.7 billion as per Tracxn.
