India’s first unicorn InMobi earned Rs 411 crore in FY20 towards Rs 508 crore spent, Rs 76 crore misplaced

India’s first unicorn InMobi, which recently scaled its mobile content platform Glance as well to the unicorn status, spent Rs 508.3 crore in total expenses for an operating revenue of Rs 411.5 crore in FY20 in comparison to Rs 440.5 crore spent to earn Rs 384.2 crore in FY19 on a standalone basis, data from regulatory filings showed. The jump in expenses and operating revenue for the company, which offers mobile advertising and mobile marketing services, from FY19 to FY20 stood at 15.4 per cent and 7.1 per cent respectively. Moreover, InMobi’s losses shot up 41.3 per cent from Rs 54.2 crore in FY19 to Rs 76.6 crore in FY20 even as its total revenue increased 11.7 per cent from Rs 386 crore to Rs 431.6 crore. The company was founded in 2007 by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, and Mohit Saxena and had hit the $1-billion-valuation mark in 2011 post SoftBank’s investment.

“The company’s financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis notwithstanding the fact that it has net loss of Rs 766,618,993 during the year ended 31 March 2020 and has a negative net worth of Rs 1,940,936,960,” the filing sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler read. The operating income included Rs 167.7 crore from advertising and Rs 243.8 crore from business support services while other income, which stood at Rs 20 crore, included Rs 18.4 crore from export incentives and Rs 1.65 crore from ‘Miscellaneous other non-operating income’ such as Rs 1.27 crore in rental income, etc. Among expenses, employee benefit expenses totaled Rs 254 crore as the biggest component followed by Rs 167 crore towards the cost of materials consumed.

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InMobi’s lock screen content platform Glance shows users personalised content on their smartphones’ locked screens based on the choice of information they browse online. The startup had raised $145 million from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital in December last year that pushed it to the unicorn status within two years of its launch. The company had claimed that with over 115 million daily active users spending 25 minutes per day, “Glance is one of the largest digital consumer platforms in the world.” On the other hand, InMobi had bought short video app Roposo in November 2019, which currently competes with the likes of MX TakaTak, Moj, Josh, Chingari, Trell, others, to leverage the market gap created post TikTok ban. InMobi had said, during Glance’s investment round, that Roposo has over 33 million monthly active users spending 20 minutes daily on the app in over 10 languages.