About
Naveen Tewari is the founder and chief executive of InMobi, the Bengaluru-headquartered advertising technology group, and of Glance, its AI-led consumer platform. Born in Kanpur in 1977, he grew up on the IIT Kanpur campus, graduated from the institute with a BTech in 2000 and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2005. He worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company from 2000 to 2003 and then with the US venture firm Charles River Ventures. In 2007 he co-founded mKhoj, an SMS-based search service, with Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal; the team switched to mobile advertising in 2008 and renamed the business InMobi. A $200 million SoftBank investment in 2011 made InMobi India's first unicorn. Tewari launched Glance in 2019, and it passed a $1 billion valuation in 2020 after raising $145 million from Google and Mithril Capital, which InMobi says made him the first Indian entrepreneur to build two unicorns. InMobi is preparing for an IPO in India, and in September 2026 private equity firm True North bought a $50-60 million stake in the company.
Tewari's record includes setbacks as well as milestones. The Miip discovery-advertising product launched in 2015 did not catch on, and in 2016 InMobi settled US Federal Trade Commission charges over location tracking, paying a reduced civil penalty of $950,000. A US listing he explored in 2021 at a valuation of up to $15 billion was shelved. Glance raised a further $200 million from Jio Platforms in 2022, and by late 2025 he had pushed it towards generative AI and agent-led shopping. He joined the board of Paytm in 2015, became an independent director of Narayana Health in 2023 and co-founded the iSPIRT think tank. His honours include IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award, the Uttar Pradesh Gaurav Samman and Forbes India's Outstanding Startup Entrepreneur award in 2021.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
