Bengaluru: Mithril Capital, the investment firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook, has invested $45 million (about Rs.324 crore) in Bengaluru-based advertising tech unicorn, InMobi's business-to-consumer unit, Glance.
Glance is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that delivers ad-free, personalised content to the lock screen of smartphones. Glance is part of the InMobi group, that also includes InMobi Marketing Cloud and TruFactor. In a press statement on Tuesday, the company claims that the content platform now has 50 million daily active users.
InMobi’s founder and chief executive Naveen Tewari told Mint that the investment will give them the “ability to grow globally and to build a few other platforms within Glance". He added that they will ink deals with a “few more investors over the next few weeks," exclusively for Glance.
Austin, Texas-headquartered Mithril Capital is a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Thiel and Ajay Royan. Ajay Royan, Managing General Partner of Mithril Capital, said, “We share Glance’s global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and engaging experiences across a myriad of cultures and languages." Royan has joined the Glance board.
The statement added that Mithril’s $45 million investment in Glance anchors a larger financing round. The new funds will enable Glance to launch new platforms such as Glance TV (a short video platform), Glance Gaming, Glance Shopping, and Glance Nearby, a hyperlocal experiential platform. The company will also use the funds to expand into South East Asia in the coming months. Glance is now available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in India, and Bahasa in Indonesia.
“Almost all of our user base is in India as of now. We now plan to launch in South East Asia, starting with Indonesia where we launched in earlier in the quarter. We may then look at other regions. For the next twelve months, we want to focus on South East Asia. Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines are of significance right now," Tewari told Mint. The company will work with production houses to create original video content, and focus on developing local, vernacular content in and outside India.
Asked about hiring a CEO for Glance, Tewari said they have no plans to do so in the near future, as they have a "large and senior leadership team in place" that reports to him. “We may look to hire someone at a later stage," he said. Glance is not profitable at the moment and they have not started to monetise it. The focus continues to be on enhancing user experience, figuring out ways in which to monetise it and building scale, he added.
