Building India’s First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you been able to follow that strategy?

Amit Gupta: Absolutely. We have remained headquartered in India and have since expanded to pursue the Asian market. After India, we focused on Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. We have since expanded into countries such as Nigeria. We are growing country by country.

Sramana: What were some of the strategic decisions you made during that growth period?

Amit Gupta: We had big dreams and aspirations. What we found was important was to get validation that what we had was indeed marketable. We found that when we took our product to the right markets, we got fairly good business. We may have had aspirations to go to the U.S., but we had less competition in other markets and there was plenty of size there to enable us to grow.

We started growing by looking at Southeast Asia. When we were done with that, we thought about going to Europe. We took a trip over there for a couple of weeks and met with potential customers. We realized that there was not a company doing exactly what we were doing and that we probably had a good opportunity. We decided to make the investment and hire a team to start operations in Europe. After that we never looked back. We came out of our shell. We stopped doubting ourselves.

Sramana: Can you trace the revenue ramp during this growth period?

Amit Gupta: When we shifted to our new business model, we did $1 million in 2007 and $1.5 million in 2008. In 2008, that revenue came from India and Indonesia. In 2009, we had 10x growth as we had expanded into multiple countries. South Africa was one of our major success stories that year. Today, we are found in almost all markets including complicated markets such as Japan and China.

We are the largest ad network in China. We are in a leadership position in Korea. We own 37% of the market in Australia. We are the market leader in India. We are in a top three position in UK, France, and Germany. We have now entered the U.S. market. Our U.S. team has started to experience growth at a phenomenal pace. We hope to be a top three player in the U.S. by 2014 or 2015.

Sramana: What was your 2013 revenue number?

Amit Gupta: We believe we will be at a billion dollar run rate this year. We are certainly reaching towards the next level of scaling our business.

Sramana: At what point did you raise more capital and what was the thinking behind it?

Amit Gupta: Our Series A money lasted for almost 1 year. We raised $8 million dollars for our Series B round from the same investors. That money lasted us a year and a half.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building India's First Billion Dollar Tech Company: InMobi Co-Founder Amit Gupta
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