Jackpot after four failures

Tewari was, in fact, born and raised in, in his words, ‘an academic bubble’ on the campus of IIT Kanpur. He and his father went to the school on the campus. “I didn’t realise till I came out of it that I grew up in an academic cauldron of excellence,” Tewari says. “My grandmother travelled to the US to do her PhD. Everybody around me was highly qualified, but unassuming, so doing a bachelor’s degree was just a beginning,” Tewari says.

He graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2000. This was when the software boom was at its peak. But he didn’t want to work for a software company. “During my internship at one of these companies, I realised that the work was mediocre, whereas I was brimming with creativity,” he says. Luckily, that was the year when McKinsey started campus placements at IIT. “None of us knew about McKinsey. We were only told that it was the most preferred job for IIMs,” he says.

Tewari attributes the building of his entrepreneurial dreams to McKinsey, particularly the opportunity of working closely with Mukesh Ambani. “I got exposed to many large enterprises, the Tatas and the Mahindras. But what particularly shaped me was the project I worked on with Reliance, in close quarters with Mukesh Ambani, for 15-16 months.” Reliance was launching its first telecom business. The team was small, and this meant Tiwari was part of every discussion. “I tell Mukesh Ambani (an investor in InMobi) even today that watching him build the Infocomm business as a 21-year-old changed me forever. I realised what it takes to create something, to be audacious, yet detail-oriented and yet execute,” he says.

Tewari then went to do his MBA at the Harvard Business School in 2003. “IIT imparted deep technical education, McKinsey exposed me to the world of business, and Harvard shook my core Indian middle-class belief in safety. “My goal was to get a job and be safe. It was at Harvard that I realised the importance of pushing the status quo.” So, after Harvard, he decided to turn down the job offers from venture capital (VC) firms, tech companies and consulting firms. “I felt if I did’t take risks now, the golden handcuffs would not let me get out. This was my only chance.” Luckily, his parents and wife were very supportive. He moved to San Francisco and started working on different ideas while his wife continued to work.

To his disappointment, his first startup failed in three months, and the second one in a few months. By then, a year had passed, and he had zero outcome. He then founded the third startup called vQube, a startup similar to WhatsApp calling. But the model was ahead of its time as the internet speed was incompatible. VCs rubbished it, and the co-founder left.
Tewari came back to India in 2007 to work on another idea, with his friends from IIT — Abhay Singhal, co-founder and CEO, InMobi Advertising and Amit Gupta, founder, Yulu and co-founder of InMobi. There was no office, but there was a vision and a drive to succeed. The idea was to build an SMS-based search and monetisation business, Mkhoj. His other friend, Mohit Saxena, co-founder and CTO, InMobi, joined later.

Tewari met many VCs for three months, after which he hit a jackpot with Mumbai Angels. Sasha Mirchandani, co-founder of Mumbai Angels, now also the MD and founder of Kae Capital, asked the founders to pitch their idea to Mumbai’s top industrialists who were observing the rise of internet companies in the West. Half an hour after the pitch, they agreed to infuse Rs 2 crore into Mkhoj.

The rise has been fast and quick. InMobi has raised $216 million in private equity to date. It also secured a $100 million debt round from Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between MUFG and Liquidity Group, in September 2024.
But, within a year of Mkhoj, Tewari and other founders realised that the idea was not big enough and informed the VCs that they wanted to shut it down. After they agreed, Mkhoj pivoted to InMobi, a mobile advertising platform, in 2009. The founders felt that there was a huge potential in mobile advertising. “We thought if the internet was going to be big on mobile phones, advertising would be a big asset,” he says.

However, by now, Tewari had four shutdowns including Mkhoj and little money in the bank. He went out again to raise money, this time for InMobi. But, even after 40 meetings, there was no luck. “Nobody believed in the power of advertising on mobile.” As a last resort, before another possible shutdown, the founders decided to go abroad to raise money.
“We went around the circuit for two weeks. The concept was accepted,” he says. Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an American venture capital firm agreed to infuse $7 million. “They said, stop your presentation and let’s talk about how you would use this capital to build the company. For someone trying to survive, this was not a question I was prepared for,” Tewari recalls.

The founders came back to their office in Mumbai, above an auto repair shop and started building InMobi with 10 employees. There has been no stopping since then. “If I could sum it all up, it was all about not giving up.”

At present, InMobi’s promoters and employees collectively own about 50% of the company, followed by SoftBank Group with just under 40%. Other major investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. “After the meeting, I passed out in the car for two hours. The body had gone through so much pressure,” he says.

The firm is now preparing for a potential IPO at a $8-$10 billion valuation by early April. Google-backed Glance — a unicorn and a subsidiary of InMobi — also plans to go public. InMobi also owns several consumer internet businesses, including Roposo (a video shopping platform), Nostra (a gaming platform), and 1Weather (a weather app). “We want to build an internet conglomerate. From India to the world,” the founder of two unicorns says.