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Naveen Tewari did not build InMobi from a successful SMS business. He and co-founders Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta and Mohit Saxena launched mKhoj in Mumbai in 2007 to deliver local search, deals and coupons by text message. When too few people used it, the team pivoted to mobile advertising, renamed the company InMobi in 2009 and secured a $200 million SoftBank investment in September 2011. That round took InMobi to the valuation threshold generally associated with India’s first unicorn, although contemporary reports differed on whether the figure was about $900 million or $1 billion.
mKhoj started as an SMS local-search service
InMobi’s official company history identifies mKhoj as the original business, founded in Mumbai in 2007. The four-person founding team—Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta and Mohit Saxena—expected people to use ordinary mobile phones to find nearby services and redeem local deals without a smartphone app.
The concept reflected the mobile market available at the time. SMS worked on basic handsets and did not require mobile broadband. Tewari later described the opportunity as a combination of rapidly expanding mobile use and limited innovation in consumer content.
In a 2009 first-person account, Tewari said the team initially pursued local information and deals through SMS. The model was designed to monetize search activity, but the number of people making requests was too low to support the business.
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Weak demand forced a decision
Tewari told The Economic Times on 21 October 2011 that the founders “realised within six months the traction was not as high as initially anticipated.” He also wrote that cash was running low. The team spent intensive time reassessing its assumptions instead of treating the early product as a business that could simply be scaled with more sales effort.
Calling mKhoj a “failed SMS startup” is therefore shorthand for weak traction in its first model, not evidence that the company became insolvent or was formally shut down. The operation survived by changing what it sold and to whom.
The pivot moved mKhoj into mobile advertising
The founders concluded that the larger opportunity was not answering individual local queries over SMS but helping businesses reach the growing mobile audience. They shifted from a consumer-facing search service to mobile-advertising infrastructure, serving advertisers and publishers across devices and markets.
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In a Bloomberg interview transcript published by InMobi on 10 November 2011, Tewari explained the bet: “The key thing about this space is the whole user base was going to shift to mobile that is what we looked at back in 2007.” The pivot put the company on the supply side of that shift, where a network could aggregate many campaigns and publishers instead of relying on enough people in one locality to text a query.
Rebranding made the new ambition explicit
mKhoj rebranded as InMobi in 2009. The new name accompanied a broader international mobile-advertising strategy rather than an India-only SMS service. InMobi’s official history records entry into North America and a Series B financing round in 2010, evidence that the company was building for a global market before its 2011 milestone.
How InMobi reached unicorn scale
Growth after the pivot was measured in the size of the network rather than the number of local-search requests. A Knowledge at Wharton interview published in June 2011 reported 315 million users in more than 140 countries. McKinsey reported almost 700 million users across more than 160 countries in 2013. Both are dated historical snapshots, not current user counts.
On 15 September 2011, InMobi and SoftBank completed a $200 million investment. The Economic Times’ 2011 report put the company’s estimated valuation at about $900 million around that funding event. InMobi’s later milestone material, including a 2022 release associated with NITI Aayog, describes the 2011 achievement as a $1 billion valuation and identifies InMobi as India’s first unicorn.
What the valuation figures mean
| Source and date | Figure | What it describes |
|---|---|---|
| The Economic Times, 2011 | About $900 million | Estimated valuation reported around the SoftBank funding round |
| SoftBank investment completed 15 September 2011 | $200 million | Size of the investment, not the company’s valuation |
| InMobi/NITI Aayog milestone release, 2022 | $1 billion | Valuation used to identify InMobi as India’s first unicorn in 2011 |
| Livemint, 2020 | Approximately ₹7,115 crore | Rupee conversion of a $1 billion valuation |
The title’s ₹3,000-crore wording is not supported by these figures. Depending on the report and exchange-rate conversion, the documented milestone is approximately $900 million to $1 billion; Livemint’s conversion of $1 billion was roughly ₹7,115 crore. The rupee amount should not be presented as a verified 2011 valuation.
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mKhoj versus InMobi
| Dimension | mKhoj | InMobi after the pivot |
|---|---|---|
| Customer problem | Finding nearby services, deals and coupons | Reaching mobile users with digital advertising |
| Distribution | SMS requests from users in an India-first model | A mobile-advertising network spanning international markets |
| Monetization | Monetizing SMS-based local search | Advertising infrastructure for campaigns and publishers |
| Geographic ambition | Local information and neighbourhood offers | Global expansion, including North America by 2010 |
| Validation | Insufficient early traction | SoftBank-backed financing and unicorn-scale valuation in 2011 |
Why the pivot worked when SMS search did not
It followed user behaviour instead of defending the first product
The founders treated low usage as evidence that the original customer proposition was wrong or premature. Rather than adding features to local SMS search, they moved toward the underlying trend they considered durable: more people spending time on mobile devices.
Advertising benefited from network scale
A local-search service had to generate repeated demand in each market. An advertising network could create value by connecting advertisers and publishers across many countries. Every additional market increased the potential inventory and audience available to campaigns, making international expansion part of the product strategy rather than a side project.
The company changed both product and identity
The 2009 InMobi name signalled that this was not a temporary adjustment to mKhoj. The rebrand aligned the company with mobile advertising and made it easier to present one global platform to customers and investors.
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What the InMobi story actually proves
- The starting point was mKhoj, founded in Mumbai in 2007—not an already successful InMobi advertising network.
- The initial SMS model failed commercially because usage was too weak, according to Tewari’s contemporary account.
- The decisive move was a pivot into mobile advertising, followed by a 2009 rebrand and international expansion.
- The four founders were Tewari, Singhal, Gupta and Saxena.
- The 2011 unicorn milestone is tied to the $200 million SoftBank investment and reported valuation figures near $900 million to $1 billion.
- “India’s first unicorn” is a historical 2011 designation; user counts and valuations cited above are not present-day measurements.
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