In a short time span of 21 months, Glance flagship product of Bengaluru-based advertising tech unicorn InMobi has reached an extraordinary milestone of 100 million Daily Active Users (DAUs). For any internet service provider it's hard to achieve in such a short time period. Glance had already crossed the mark of more than 50 million daily active users in August last year and claimed that its users spend 22 minutes per day on the platform at that time. Now, the average time spent by the users on the platform has increased to 25 minutes per day.

Glance holds its presence in India, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand having a market of around 130 million users. India solely has over 80 million users.

Glance - Made in India

'Glance' is a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) vertical of InMobi (13 year old Start-Up) that brings personalised content to lock screen of smartphones through identification of trending topics ranking them according to the interest of the users. All this is made possible with Artificial Intelligence tools like computer vision and machine learning algorithms for ranking and tagging, suggesting paraphrases, searching for the right image, sequencing different content pieces and for predictive serving and caching of content. However, humans are looped in too.

Unlike other applications, Glance doesn't require any application to be downloaded. Users have to just enable its service on Android phones. Every time a user touches their lock screen on smartphones, lock screen comes alive with up to the minute visual and interplay content that is individualized.

Why a lock-screen service ?

Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive at InMobi strongly believes that lockscreen ecosystem in itself robust and when tethered with high-quality content, will surely revolutionize the way of content consumption. This is also the reason, Glance is the world’s first screen zero platform.

Nowadays, people find ways as easy as ABC to get high quality content quickly and with Glance, users can experience rich and precise content in few minutes on their Android lock-screens, that too without unlocking and without having an app installed.

Why in-built platform ?

Since smartphone access is much easier, it is the first choice of content user. And amidst so many 3rd party application available on the Play Store, downloading and organizing takes time. If same thing comes with the product in-built, it provides more convenience.

The subsidiary of InMobi maintain tie-ups with almost every top android smartphone manufacturer including Xiaomi and Samsung. Most of the android smartphone in India today have Glance pre-installed in it.

It's all about Rich Content !!

19 content categories are at one's fingertips, duration ranging from 10 seconds to 2 minutes long including -

Not only that, the service is equipped with auto-learning feature, thanks to artificial intelligence. So, with each content being watched, Glance become smarter to show content as per one choice and preference.

Major Events :

In September 2019, InMobi had secured $ 45 million for its vertical focussing on Glance from US-based venture capital firm, Mithril Capital as a part of its ongoing Series-D round. Since then, the company launched multiple new products and platforms including Glance TV, Glance Gaming, and Glance Shopping along with expanding itself into south-east Asia.

In November 2019, InMobi announced the acquisition of the Gurugram-headquartered short-video entertainment app Roposo, which offered users to watch videos in 10 languages across its 24 channels. The acquisition enabled Glance to tap into Roposo’s network of regional influencers, vernacular content creators, along with its more than 42 million user base.

The road ahead for Glance :

With its Scree-Zero mode of presence on the lock screens, Glance wants to become the content gateway for consumers. Co-founder & CEO, Naveen Tiwari credits the growth of the company to its culture and innovation. He said, “I was listening in on a customer feedback call and the customer said, ‘I love Glance because it makes me happy every time I look at my phone.”

Glance, being the world’s first and fastest growing screen zero platform, is changing the landscape of content consumption. InMobi Group is India’s 1st Unicorn and has been recognized in the list of both the 2018 and 2019 CNBC Disruptor 50 and as one of Fast Company's 2018 World's Most Innovative Companies. It plans to provide service across the world in the next 2 years.