InMobi secures $100 million debt to fund its AI efforts, acquisitions

InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari

Adtech firm InMobi on September 11 announced it has raised $100 million in debt financing to boost its future artificial intelligence (AI) development and deployment efforts and fund potential AI-focused acquisitions ahead of a possible IPO next year.

The financing was led by MARS Growth Capital, a joint venture between MUFG and Liquidity Group.

InMobi said the financing raised will be used to significantly deepen the company's AI capabilities to help brands better engage with consumers in more immersive and personalised manner beyond the standard ad unit.

"AI is the bedrock of both InMobi’s consumer and enterprise businesses, and we are using it to power the revolutionary lock screen experiences and InMobi Advertising’s platforms" said InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari in a statement.

"We are reimagining how ads can be made truly native by driving superior engagement and outcomes for consumers, advertisers and publishers," he said.

SoftBank-backed InMobi, which was India's first unicorn startup, currently has two core businesses - InMobi Advertising and Glance.

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InMobi Advertising offers data-driven media solutions that enables brands to connect with their audiences through targeted ads.

Glance is an AI-powered content discovery platform, that delivers personalised content and entertainment directly to users’ smartphones on their lockscreens. The platform claims to have more than 300 million users across multiple countries including India, the United States, Southeast Asia, and Japan.

Started in 2019, Glance raised $200 million from Jio Platforms in February 2022 to accelerate its global expansion. It also counts technology giant Google and Silicon Valley-based venture fund Mithril Capital among its investors and entered the unicorn club (companies with more than $1 billion valuation) in December 2020.

Building consumer businesses like Glance is critical for InMobi's goal of becoming one of the largest independent advertising platforms.

"Our broader strategy is to have very formidable owned and operated global consumer platforms, combine that with a very large advertising platform, and both support each other," Tewari told Moneycontrol in June 2022.

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