InMobi Looks At IPO In 2021 After ‘Best Ever Year’ Amid Pandemic

Bengaluru-headquartered mobile adtech unicorn InMobi Group is planning an initial public offering (IPO) for its core adtech business this year.

InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari said the IPO in 2021 is the logical step after 2020 which was “the best ever” year for the company on the advertising side with massive growth, very large scale and huge profitability. Various reports also point to an increase in screen time and mobile app usage amid the pandemic, with India being among the frontrunners in terms of downloads for mobile apps across categories. 

“We feel pretty confident when thinking about a path to an IPO, ” he told ET, which first reported the development.

Founded in 2007, Bengaluru-headquartered InMobi specialises in mobile marketing and mobile advertising and became India’s first unicorn startup in 2011. Last month, InMobi-owned lock screen content platform Glance received an investment of $145 Mn from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital to enter the unicorn club. The company had acquired Roposo in 2019 to bolster its vernacular video presence. 

Glance will use the new investment to deepen its AI capabilities across Glance and Roposo, the short video platform which it acquired in November 2019, to expand its technology team, launch services on the platform, further strengthen the brand and drive expansion in global markets.

Besides Glance, 10 other Indian startups defied the pandemic to enter the unicorn club in 2020 as investors posed their faith in growth-stage startups. Tewari has said that InMobi’s motivation for going for an IPO was driven by the public markets turning bullish on adtech companies in the last 12-18 months, despite the pandemic. 

“The reason the (public) market was not very bullish on the adtech sector is they thought the whole market would be taken by Google and Facebook, which didn’t happen,” Tewari told the publication.