THE STARTUP PIONEER: NAVEEN TEWARI-FOUNDED INMOBI WAS INDIA'S FIRST UNICORN. WHAT SETS IT APART IS HOW IT HAS HAD A MULTIPLIER EFFECT ON THE ECOSYSTEM.

MOST STARTUP founders aspire for unicorn status for their ventures. Naveen Tewari, founder & CEO of the InMobi Group, was the first one to get it in India; and he achieved unicorn status for another of his brands some 10 years later.

- RUKMINI RAO

What sets him apart is the fact that many of his former employees have also founded successful ventures. Among these is Meesho, a unicorn.

While Tewari ushered in the trend of unicorns in India, currently his energies are concentrated on AI. In May, Glance—a screen lock discovery platform that is a subsidiary of the InMobi Group—unveiled its AI version. In its new avatar, it acts as your personal stylist—just click a selfie and answer a few questions. Once set up, Glance will recommend styles by dressing you up in various outfits—albeit virtually—and also let you shop for the look. With millions spent on its development, the company has also struck a long-term deal with Google (also one of its leading investors) to scale its AI infrastructure using the American tech giant's DeepMind and Gemini. Tewari feels that the move has set InMobi up for the future. That's a long way for a company that started operations in Mumbai in 2007 as mKhoj, an SMS-based search engine.

Tewari, 47, was raised on the IIT Kanpur campus, where his grandmother and father were professors. He went on to graduate from the institute, before arming himself with an MBA from Harvard. He is candid when asked why he chose to become an entrepreneur. “You are expecting a very logical answer, but a large portion of this is illogical, gut based. So, to give you a very good why, or what, would be me making things up to a certain extent,” he says.

Be that as it may, Tewari has always been the first to spot trends, and his ideas have often been ahead of their time—so much so that he struggled to raise money from investors in India!

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