Masayoshi Son rejigs InMobi investment ahead of $1 billion IPO
The $30 billion SVF 2 has capital only from SoftBank.
InMobi, the country’s first technology firm to break the billion-dollar unicorn valuation barrier, has kickstarted its US listing process by appointing three investment banks — including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs – as advisors to help raise $500 million to $1 billion, the people said.
However, it is unclear whether the listing process will involve only a specific ad-tech vertical at a $5-$8 billion valuation, or the entire group valued likely at $12-$15 billion.
The company and its investors are looking at a listing in the ongoing financial year.
SoftBank and InMobi declined to comment.
InMobi Pte, its parent entity, is around 45% owned by founders and employees, while the remaining is with investors, including the two largest – SoftBank and Sherpalo Ventures.
InMobi closely works with tech giant Microsoft and powers the ad sales for its search engine Bing. The two companies also have a commercial partnership, with the Seattle-based technology giant working with InMobi to bring its marketing automation platform to its global enterprise customers. In return, the Indian firm runs its applications on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform.
Recently, InMobi raised $145 million from Google and Mithril Capital to grow in the social networking space.
The parent firm also owns 55% in lock screen content platform Glance.
Glance owns short-video app Roposo, which it acquired soon after TikTok was forced to pull out of the Indian market last year following a government ban.
In December last year, InMobi claimed Glance had 115 million daily active users, largely in India, who spend an average 25 minutes on the platform daily.
InMobi is looking to use Glance to reach consumers directly, and while it eventually plans to monetise the platform through digital ads, it said the bigger focus currently was to grow engagement and distribution.
On InMobi’s core advertising business, cofounder and CEO Naveen Tewari had earlier told ET that he was looking to take the 13-year-old company public as the market had become quite bullish about the ad-tech sector over the last 12-18 months, largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic that has pushed several industries to digitise faster.
As per global advertising agency network Dentsu, the global digital ad spend is expected to touch $579 billion in 2021, on the back of digital spends accounting for half of all expenditure for the first time, reflecting an acceleration amid the pandemic.
This also comes on the back of the ad-tech sector seeing some sort of movement in favour of smaller players after governments across the world, including in the US, EU nations and Australia, started questioning the dominance of giants Google and Facebook in the space.
“The reason why the (public) market was not very bullish on the ad-tech sector (was) because they thought the whole market would be taken by Google and Facebook, which didn’t happen,” Tewari had said. “They will be the largest players, don’t get me wrong, taking about 60-70% of the market. But the 25-35% market will be left for others. The ad-tech market is massive especially after the Covid-year 2020.”
Since April 1, SVF 2 has invested in 20 companies.
A wave of digital IPOs of Asian technology giants, backed by SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, are hitting the public markets around the world — Grab, Didi, ByteDance and Tokopedia-Gojek combine, prompting the maverick Japanese investor to promise shareholders that the $46 billion in annual profit will not be a one-off.
This comes after a tumultuous year when some of the Vision Fund’s largest bets were hit by the global pandemic.
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