InMobi's Locked Screen News Product Glance Raises $45 Million

Indian mobile phone ad firm InMobi has raised $45 million for its new locked screen news app Glance. This is InMobi's first B2C product ever. The funding came from noted firm Mithril Capital, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas and was co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan. Mithril’s backing is part of a larger $75 million financing round, and other investors will likely be announced over the course of next two months. Glance is an artificial intelligence-driven, personalised content platform that works on the lockscreens of smartphones. Every time a user wakes up their phone, their lock screen has new visual and interactive content, personalised according to his/her taste. A noted financial daily reported that Glance has more than 50 million daily active users who spend 22 minutes per day on the portal. It also added that the company has reportedly partnered with about 1,000 media agencies for the same. Reportedly, InMobi will be using these funds to launch other platforms including:

• Glance TV, a mobile-first, short-form video platform
• Glance Gaming, which targets casual gamers
• Glance Shopping, for commerce needs
• Glance Nearby, a hyperlocal experiential platform

Ajay Royan, managing general partner and co-founder of Mithril Capital, told a news portal, “Glance, the world’s first and fastest-growing screen zero platform, is a powerful innovation to democratize content and commerce on the mobile Internet. 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.”