INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Glance, a subsidiary of Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi, said today it has raised $45 million as it prepares to scale its business
outside of India and bulk up its product offerings.The unnamed maiden financing round for Glance was funded by Mithril Capital, a
growth-stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan.In an interview with TechCrunch, Naveen
Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi Group, said the current round has not closed and could bag another $30 million to $55 million in the next
two months.Glance operates an eponymous service that shows media content in local languages on the lock screen of Android-powered
InMobi has partnered with a number of top smartphone vendors, including Xiaomi, Samsung and Gionee, to integrate Glance into their
respective operating systems.Glance, which was launched in September last year and supports English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, has amassed 50
million monthly active users in India, its primary market
global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and
not show traditional ads, something it intends to never change, but shows a certain kind of content to drive engagement for brands.In the
months to come, Glance plans to expand the platform and bring short-form videos (Glance TV), and mini games (Glance Games) to the lock
It is also working on a feature dubbed Glance Nearby that will enable brands to court users in their vicinity, and Glance Shopping to
explore ways to build commerce around content.As of today, InMobi Group is not monetizing Glance platform, but plans to explore ways to make
money from it early next year, Tewari said.The 12-year-old firm said it plans to expand footprints of Glance outside of India
The company plans to take Glance to some Southeast Asian markets like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand
Tewari said.The firm, which has three subsidiaries, including its marquee marketing cloud division, plans to go public in the next few years
But instead of taking the entire group public, Tewari said the firm is thinking of publicly listing each division as they mature
remain, and we will evaluate them as we go along
