India AI content startup gets $45M from Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital to expand globally
$45 million.
That’s the amount of capital Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi just raised for its Glance unit. The funding came from global firm Mithril Capital, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas and was cofounded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan.
Glance provides consumers with artificial intelligence-driven, personalized content to the lock screens of smartphones.
“Every time a user wakes up their phone, their lock screen comes alive with new visual and interactive content that is personalized for them,” the company said in its announcement.
The newly acquired funds, which anchor a larger financing round, will help the company launch multiple platforms and expand into southeast Asia in the coming months.
Those platforms include; Glance TV, a mobile-first, short form video platform; Glance Gaming, which targets casual gamers; Glance Shopping, for commerce needs; and Glance Nearby which the company says will be a hyperlocal experiential platform.
“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.”
Glance has partnered with Android phone makers in India to deliver a universal screen zero experience and is available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in India, and Bahasa in Indonesia. Sixty-five percent of all new smartphones in India have Glance pre-installed, according to the company.
“Glance is changing the landscape of content consumption to address the demands of the ‘attention economy’ we currently live in,” said Naveen Tewari, founder & CEO, InMobi Group. “By bringing discovery and consumption of personalized, short-form content to screen zero, Glance provides the immediacy and accessibility that consumers want.”
He added, “This investment from Mithril will help us further accelerate our journey through continued innovation in content-format, personalization and content discovery, and expand into new geographies. We are also delighted to have an entrepreneurial investor like Ajay Royan partner with us on the Glance board.”
As of August, more than 50 million daily active users spend 22 minutes per day on Glance, according to the company.