Naveen Tiwari – From an academician to disruptive entrepreneur

Naveen Tiwari, CEO and Founder of InMobi has realized the Indian dream of a global company.

The recent investment by Reliance Jio of US$ 200 million into Glance, a subsidiary of InMobi and talks of InMobi's social media arm Roposo in discussions with Reliance Retail for a social commerce related business deal has brought into the limelight- InMobi’s CEO and Co-founder Naveen Tiwari.

InMobi founded in 2007 by Tiwari, Abhay Singhal and Piyush Shah achieved the status of India’s first Unicorn startup company. What started as an SMS based search business in Mumbai going by the name of mKhoj pivoted to InMobi in 2009. Tiwari proclaims to have dealt with a string of failures (learning from them) to have finally tasted success in InMobi. The year 2011 marked the investment of US$ 200 million by SoftBank, making InMobi India’s first startup Unicorn. Today the company through its offerings reaches 1.5-2 billion people.

Glance, a leading AI-driven lock-screen platform raised US$ 145million from Google and its existing Silicon Valley-based investor Mithril Capital in December 2020 taking the company valuation in the league of Unicorns. The investment, made through Reliance's Jio Platforms unit, values Glance at US$ 1.7 billion to US$ 1.8 billion post-money.

With two Unicorns under his leadership, in his words, his is a “story of more failures than success.”

Naveen Tiwari, hailing from a family of academicians is a “Distinguished Alumnus” of IIT(Kanpur) and has a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he was also bestowed with the Dean’s Award, for his exceptional leadership and contribution.

Tiwari is personally invested in and supports several start-ups like NestAway, SlideRule, Mettl, Moneysights, Bombay Canteen, Zimmber, Razorpay etc.

He is a board member at Paytm in one hand and chairs a US-based NGO - India School Fund working for the rural school development.

His achievements have received much recognition. He was awarded Future Leaders Award’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 2015; Fortune’s ‘40 under 40’ most powerful, influential and important people in business, 2015 to name a few.

Tiwari sums up his success story in 3 mantras

1. Dream Big- See the world that would be rather than what it is.

2. Make decisions based on gut but be disciplined.

3. Vision to be a global business.

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