The tech parks dotting the length and breadth of Bengaluru are marvels of cleanliness and efficiency, compared with the cacophony and chaos on the streets outside. Once you enter one of these parks, which house innumerable IT companies, things work, unlike most of the public infrastructure.

After nearly two hours on the road, to cover a mere 16 km, we enter the offices of InMobi at one such tech park, on the city’s outer ring road, to meet Naveen Tewari — a man whose firm’s obituary has been written multiple times, only for him to bounce back stronger each time.

Usually these interactions take place at a well-rated restaurant, but he has been so much on the road — ahead of a likely IPO — that we end up agreeing to meet at an aseptic executive lunch-room at InMobi’s office. There is a sense of vibrancy, energy and colour in the InMobi office, reflecting the average age of the firm’s 2,000-plus employees, most of whom are in the mid-20s.

By all accounts, InMobi — India’s first unicorn — has no right to exist. It was trying to build a global mobile advertising and technology platform, taking on the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook) and Amazon Advertising. Just a decade ago, the company was on the ropes, with just enough money to last another quarter, nearly becoming a ‘unicorpse’. Not many gave it a chance of surviving, forget thriving. But Tewari has always shown the survival skills of a cockroach. Seventeen years of gritty existence later, the firm is a success.

Academia to industry

Tewari does not come from a business background. His great grandfather was a schoolteacher. His grandmother Krishna Tewari was the first woman professor in an IIT and broke academic glass ceilings. After an early marriage, kids and separation — a near taboo in her conservative milieu — she studied advanced mathematics and was offered a full professorship at MIT. Circumstances did not allow her to move to the US, so she chose to teach at IIT-Kanpur. Tewari’s father was one of the youngest IIT professors; teaching at IIT-Kanpur, he went on to become the dean and, later, Director General of Central Power Research Institute. Tewari’s uncle, too, was the founder of IIT-Gandhinagar. So, academia was in his blood.

While he took the traditional route of studying in an IIT, Tewari says that, encouraged by his father, he decided to look beyond academia, to working with consulting firm McKinsey. It was a stroke of luck.

The Ambani connect

McKinsey was working with Mukesh Ambani, who was then charting Reliance’s entry into telecom against established players like Bharati and Tata. “I was merely 22 years old, but being in the same room and working as an executive assistant to Mukesh Ambani, observing how he took decisions, was bigger than any degree. When his team came back and said they could bring down call prices to ₹2 (when incoming calls were at ₹8 and outgoing at ₹16), he wanted it at 50 paise. The kind of bold decisions he took, without being cocky, is something I observed,” he says.

Tewari says he saw Ambani hear out everybody before arriving at a decision. “The scale of his thinking and ability to visualise something that did not yet exist truly amazed me.” It also fired up his own entrepreneurial ambitions. Later, Ambani would even make a small investment when Tewari ventured out, but that is getting ahead of the story.

After three years at McKinsey, Tewari decided to broaden his horizons by going to Harvard. “It is not mere classroom learning. People would hang out in pubs and bars over the weekend. Students from diverse countries, with different experiences, exposure, and insight. Like a typical Indian middle-class person, initially I never used to go, not realising the opportunities one was missing.”

He was trying to save $20-50 per day on the weekends. Until a friend pointed out that he was trying to save 6-7 per cent of the total fee, but that would deprive him of the upside of having these relationships, which could potentially change his life altogether. Incidentally, that friend, during that summer, started and sold Rocket Internet for a whopping $300 million.

By the time he graduated, Tewari had job offers from four companies, including the likes of Google and Yahoo, all in San Francisco. On the day he landed in the city, he bought a high-end Audi. Then he had a moment of realisation. “I call it the middle-class curse — instead of me owning the Audi, it ended up owning me, because I now had to work just to pay it off.” That realisation nudged him towards entrepreneurship.

The path to growth

Things weren’t easy. He had married early, at 22. He had known Aditi, his wife, since they were in Std V and she was also a fellow IIT-ian. She was working with Accenture Labs and had moved with him to the US. “My father had passed away by then, but when I decided to become an entrepreneur, she stood by me,” Tewari says.

As we chat, we serve ourselves a simple lunch of rice, roti, methi dal, bhindi sabzi and salad. Tewari says that between 2005 and 2007, together with friends he experimented with multiple ventures, including a voice-over-IP calling and an early SMS-based search engine called mKhoj. His family — by then he had kids — had moved back to India.

While none of the initial ventures worked out, he realised the potential of mobile advertising. So he pivoted mKhoj to mobile advertising and rebranded it as InMobi. However, it took time to gain traction. Tewari recalls his meeting with Masayoshi Son, the charismatic founder of SoftBank, whom he was initially planning to ask for an investment of $10 million but finally decided to boldly ask for $250 million. Son agreed, at a valuation that made InMobi India’s first unicorn. Tewari had arrived.

Rebuilding with grit

If the first decade of InMobi was about survival, the second was about discipline and a refusal to retreat into a defensive crouch when things went wrong in 2016.

Flush with SoftBank capital and the halo of being India’s first unicorn, the company had slipped into what Tewari calls “callous execution” — loss-making deals signed in the name of scale, weak controls, and an assumption that capital would always be available. When a promised follow-on cheque from SoftBank failed to materialise amid internal changes at the Japanese investor, InMobi was suddenly burning $20 million a quarter, with barely weeks of runway left.

“In 45 days, we became broke,” he says matter-of-factly. “But in the very next quarter, we lost zero.”

The turnaround was not cosmetic. Revenue shrank as InMobi walked away from bad business, rewrote contracts, and rebuilt its operating cadence. What followed, between 2016 and 2019, was what Tewari calls his best execution years — a period when no one was watching; external pressure was absent; and the company quietly rebuilt its core.

The analogy he uses is from cricket. When the Indian team of the 1990s lost wickets, it defended. InMobi chose to attack. It made acquisitions, doubled down on its advertising platform, and began building what Tewari believed would define the next decade of digital advertising — not incremental gains, but structural shifts. That instinct to play offence when written off would surface again, more dramatically, with Glance.

Lock screen and AI bets

Launched in 2019, Glance turns smartphone lock screens into live, personalised content and commerce feeds. What began as an unconventional consumer product quickly became a strategic AI bet.

Today, Tewari describes Glance not as an app, but a “shopping intelligence platform” — trained on commerce-specific data, and sitting atop foundational models rather than merely wrapping them. “We are not using AI to optimise operations,” he says. “We are using AI to change an entire experience — the way the world shops.”

The ambition is characteristically outsized. Glance, he says, has trained one of India’s first commerce-focused AI foundation models and partnered deeply with Google, which has invested heavily and opened up access to its Gemini stack and large-scale cloud compute. In Tewari’s view, the future of AI will belong not solely to hyperscalers but also “middle-layer” platforms trained vertically — on shopping, media, finance — using core models as infrastructure.

The focus, tellingly, is the US. “If you want to win in software, you have to win in the US,” he says plainly. Glance’s US user base, currently in the single-digit millions, is expected to grow sharply, driven by the fact that revenue per user there can be nearly 50 times higher than in India.

With an IPO for InMobi around the corner, Tewari is trying to work with the next generation of entrepreneurs and has personally invested in nearly 40 startups. “If I can help somebody avoid the mistakes we made and work with them to ensure a faster learning curve, that is success,” he adds.

Even as we enjoy some papaya slices and dry fruit ladoo as dessert, Tewari abstains. As the lunch winds down, conversation drifts to his hobbies. There are few indulgences. Tewari runs, cycles, eats sparingly, and sleeps religiously. “This is a marathon,” he says again.

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Published on January 5, 2026