At the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, InMobi Group founder and chief Naveen Tewari said that he doesn’t want Bengaluru to be called the Silicon Valley of India; instead, he suggested it be called as ‘Bengaluru of Bharat.’
Based in Bengaluru, InMobi was founded in 2007 by Tewari alongside Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, Mohit Saxena, and Piyush Shah. The company’s advertisement serving algorithm helps in optimising the ranking of the advertisements shown on mobile phones. It became India’s first unicorn startup back in 2011. Two years later, Glance—owned by InMobi—an AI-first screen zero content discovery platform, also achieved unicorn status.
“I call Bengaluru my Karma Bhumi,” said Tewari, expressing his love for the place and gratitude for the people who have built the tech capabilities for decades.
Giving the analogy of cricket, he said: “We may have hit the first run, but I must congratulate my colleagues and entrepreneurs as they continued that journey by hitting a century.”
Further, he said that a large part of that century was made within the state and city. Bengaluru has produced the highest number of unicorns in India—i.e., more than 40 unicorn startups, alongside successful bootstrapped businesses with strong fundamentals. He said that Bengaluru quickly became a place for entrepreneurs to play their game.
As per StartupBlink, Bengaluru’s startup ecosystem ranks 8th globally. The city shows positive momentum increasing two spots since 2021. Bengaluru also ranks at number one in India and South Asia.
Read: AIM Long Read: Best Indian Cities to Launch AI Startups
India Bets Big on Software
“Now, I am an entrepreneur. I set ambitions, and I go for them. I may fail, but I will go for them,” said Tewari, setting bold visions for India. But, he said, firstly, as Indians, we do not want to play small anymore—we want to play big. “My vision for this country is that we should be running this software for all the products in the world in the years to come,” he added.
He also said that technology has changed life not just for India but across the globe, and software dictates how we live, what we do, and how we deal with things every day. “To be able to write software for the world, I think we have earned the right,” he added, saying that software will be the sector that India will dominate, pointing at geopolitical benefits, innovation, and IT creation.
“When I started many years back, almost 15 years ago, I was told that you can not create products out of India. . . I think we proved a few people wrong,” said the InMobi chief, adding that they created a global product and have many more global products in the making thanks to the rich talent in the country.
“I think it is actually visible now,” pointing at stats around the number of startups (8000+) and unicorns (100+) in the country. “If that is not innovation, in a short period of 15 years, I do not know what innovation is,” he added, saying that India has earned the right to create the best products in the world.
Read: The Real Reason Why India Falls Behind In Innovation
While InMobi chief’s ambitions are quite futuristic, the real question is whether they can be achieved in the coming years. From a technology standpoint, most startups in India, including the unicorns, fall under the category of AI adopters and not creators of algorithms or models. On the other hand, the majority of IT companies are succumbing to service-based solutions and are not innovating enough.
Simultaneously, when it comes to contributing to the open-source community, there is very little contribution from the Indian tech firms while most of their products are built using open-source algorithms and codes. InMobi has been one of the active contributors in the open source community, besides Cred, Zerodha, Thoughtworks, and others. But the question is, what about the other unicorns?
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