17 October, 2024
EXCLUSIVE: InMobi eyes $10 billion valuation in 2025 India IPO
Adtech startup InMobi is eyeing a valuation of about $10 billion in an initial public offering it is planning for next year, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The firm plans to list in India, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are private. InMobi is profitable and plans to shift its domicile from Singapore to India in the coming months, the sources added.
An IPO in India at a valuation of $10 billion would make this one of the biggest listings by a local software startup. The majority of startups to list in India in recent years have sought valuations below $5 billion. Paytm, which listed at a $20 billion valuation in 2021, has seen its market cap fall to $3.5 billion since.
InMobi is planning to list at the group level, which includes its advertising arm as well as investments and ownership in Glance, a unicorn startup that operates an Android lockscreen platform, the sources added. InMobi expects to generate an annual revenue of more than $700 million by the end of March, one of the sources said.
Google, an existing backer of Glance, is engaging with InMobi to lead a new funding round of more than $200 million in Glance, according to one of the sources. A funding round could close within weeks.
An InMobi spokesperson declined to comment on Wednesday.
InMobi, founded in 2007, was the first Indian startup to become a unicorn, but the firm has had its share of ups and downs as it initially struggled to secure its foothold in the digital advertising space, dominated by Google and Meta.
InMobi operates a comprehensive advertising platform that integrates demand-side and supply-side technologies with a large ad exchange. It serves tens of thousands of app partnerships across 50 countries. The firm today counts Mastercard, Samsung, Vodafone, Ford, Kellogg’s, L’Oréal Paris, Nokia, Kia, KFC, Dell and Coca-Cola among its clients.
InMobi has raised less than $300 million to date, and counts SoftBank among its backers. SoftBank once wrote off its investment in the startup.
In the past decade, it has expanded its advertising business and built a consumer business, which it leverages for Glance.
Glance brings news, information on local events, sports, media content and games directly to the lockscreen of Android smartphones. The app is installed on more than 450 million smartphones and is active on about 300 million of them. Glance recently started a pilot in the U.S., TechCrunch reported.
The firm plans to soon launch a revamped version of Glance that will incorporate generative AI to bring personalized feeds and experiences to users. One feature will allow users to see themselves in clothes from different brands, according to internal demos reviewed by TechCrunch.
Glance doesn’t collect personal data on users. InMobi is betting that generative AI will help the app adapt to user preferences and offer experiences that will hook them to the platform and drive commerce.
InMobi is planning to roll out similar generative AI offerings in its advertising business to enable the creation and insertions of native advertisements into a wide range of content, according to the demos.
EXCLUSIVE: InMobi eyes $10 billion valuation in 2025 India IPO
Adtech startup InMobi is eyeing a valuation of about $10 billion in an initial public offering it is planning for next year, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The firm plans to list in India, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are private. InMobi is profitable and plans to shift its domicile from Singapore to India in the coming months, the sources added.
An IPO in India at a valuation of $10 billion would make this one of the biggest listings by a local software startup. The majority of startups to list in India in recent years have sought valuations below $5 billion. Paytm, which listed at a $20 billion valuation in 2021, has seen its market cap fall to $3.5 billion since.
InMobi is planning to list at the group level, which includes its advertising arm as well as investments and ownership in Glance, a unicorn startup that operates an Android lockscreen platform, the sources added. InMobi expects to generate an annual revenue of more than $700 million by the end of March, one of the sources said.
Google, an existing backer of Glance, is engaging with InMobi to lead a new funding round of more than $200 million in Glance, according to one of the sources. A funding round could close within weeks.
An InMobi spokesperson declined to comment on Wednesday.
InMobi, founded in 2007, was the first Indian startup to become a unicorn, but the firm has had its share of ups and downs as it initially struggled to secure its foothold in the digital advertising space, dominated by Google and Meta.
InMobi operates a comprehensive advertising platform that integrates demand-side and supply-side technologies with a large ad exchange. It serves tens of thousands of app partnerships across 50 countries. The firm today counts Mastercard, Samsung, Vodafone, Ford, Kellogg’s, L’Oréal Paris, Nokia, Kia, KFC, Dell and Coca-Cola among its clients.
InMobi has raised less than $300 million to date, and counts SoftBank among its backers. SoftBank once wrote off its investment in the startup.
In the past decade, it has expanded its advertising business and built a consumer business, which it leverages for Glance.
Glance brings news, information on local events, sports, media content and games directly to the lockscreen of Android smartphones. The app is installed on more than 450 million smartphones and is active on about 300 million of them. Glance recently started a pilot in the U.S., TechCrunch reported.
The firm plans to soon launch a revamped version of Glance that will incorporate generative AI to bring personalized feeds and experiences to users. One feature will allow users to see themselves in clothes from different brands, according to internal demos reviewed by TechCrunch.
Glance doesn’t collect personal data on users. InMobi is betting that generative AI will help the app adapt to user preferences and offer experiences that will hook them to the platform and drive commerce.
InMobi is planning to roll out similar generative AI offerings in its advertising business to enable the creation and insertions of native advertisements into a wide range of content, according to the demos.
Chef Robotics eyes commercial kitchens with $14.75M raise
In the past several years, the kitchen has increasingly become a focal point for the world of automation. Miso, for instance, has made a name for itself with Flippy, a hamburger cooking arm that has found its way into chain restaurants like White Castle. Others, including Zume Robotics, have been less successful — the pizza robot firm shut its doors last year after attempting a major pivot into Earth-conscious food packaging.
Chef Robotics has been kicking since 2019. The founding was unquestionably fortuitous timing, just ahead of COVID-related closures and resulting labor shortages that continue to this day in industries like fast food. This week, the San Francisco–based firm announced that it has closed a $14.75 million combo equity/debt round.
The new cash infusion follows a raise of $7.7 million in 2021, bringing the total funding up to $22.5 million. That figure includes $18.2 million in equity and $4.25 million in debt. MaC Venture Capital, MFV Partners, Interwoven Ventures and Alumni Ventures joined existing backers, Construct Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures and Red and Blue Ventures.
Much of the money will go toward deploying Chef’s go-to-market strategy, which is based around a RaaS (robotics-as-a-service) plan. RaaS is proving to be an extremely popular model in the world of industrial automation, as the upfront cost of a big robot is far too steep for many companies to foot. The company will also be hiring engineers and technicians, growing a headcount that currently numbers around 30.
Chef founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by focusing on food assembly, rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software driving its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]ood is very highly dimensional: depending on how you prep the ingredients (e.g., julienned onions vs. chopped), cook the ingredients (e.g., sautéed, baked, broiled), store the ingredients (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the material properties radically differ,” the company notes. “And these properties change daily based on who is prepping and cooking. To deal with this, Chef uses various sensors — like cameras — to collect training data and then trains models that help the company learn how to manipulate a large corpus of ingredients.”
Part of the reason the company places such emphasis on the software/AI side of things is that most of Chef’s hardware components are off-the-shelf. There is, after all, a philosophy among many roboticist that if existing solutions do the job, there’s no reason to reinvent that specific wheel.
Chef isn’t revealing specific sales figures, only saying that it has “robots at food companies in five cities around the U.S. and Canada,” including “Fortune 500 food companies.” Bhageria also tells TechCrunch that it has quadrupled “recurring revenue from 2022 to 2023,” though, again, nothing more specific than that.
Belgian computer vision startup Robovision eyes US expansion to address labor shortages
Faced with labor shortages, sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture are increasingly adopting AI in their automation.
Computer vision startups are looking to jump on that opportunity with a range of point solutions for both industries. From data collection to crop monitoring and harvesting, robots with eyes are entering the fields.
One big challenge that remains, however, is implementation: If such solutions are not easy to use, they won’t be used.
Belgian startup Robovision believes it has found a way around that. The company wants to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core. It has built a “no-code” computer vision AI platform that doesn’t require software developers or data scientists to be involved at every step of the process. Robovision doesn’t make robots, but as its name suggests, the company also targets robotics companies that want to develop new machines that support AI-enabled automation.
In practice, this means Robovision customers can use its platform to upload data, label it, test their model and deploy it in production. The company says its model can be useful for a variety of use cases such as recognizing fruit at supermarket scale, identifying faults in newly made electrical components and even cutting rose stems.
Out of its base in Belgium, Robovision already serves customers in 45 countries, CEO Thomas Van den Driessche told TechCrunch in an interview. Now, thanks to a recent sizable funding round, it’s expanding to the U.S., banking on interest from industrial and agribusiness customers in that gigantic market.
The Series A round of $42 million is being co-led by Belgian agtech investor Astanor Ventures and Target Global. The latter is a Berlin-based investor and its participation in this fundraise marks a departure from some of the other coverage it’s had of late: controversy over its ties to Russian money. Red River West, a French VC that focuses on funding European startups looking to break into North America, also participated in the round.
With a post-money valuation of $180 million, this new round brings the total amount of equity funding raised by Robovision to $65 million, including two converted notes. This still leaves the founders together with the staff owning more than 50% of Robovision, its chief growth officer, Florian Hendrickx, told TechCrunch via email.
What is the point?
One challenge that Robovision faces in its expansion is that working with different sectors complicates messaging and its go-to-market strategy. On the plus side, learnings and experiments in one application can be applied to another. Robovision, for example, was able to apply some of the 3D deep learning it had developed for disease detection in tulips to disease detection in human lungs during the COVID crisis.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” founder Jonathan Berte told TechCrunch. “It has been the DNA of Robovision of striking the delicate balance between diversity and focus.”
That DNA comes from Robovision’s history: It was founded in 2012 as a consultancy studio, and it was several years before it pivoted into the B2B platform approach that also made it more attractive to VCs.
The initial traction Robovision gained was in agtech, which represents 50% of its activities, Van den Driessche said. Agtech is also where its Series A’s co-lead investor, Astanor, comes from: That company focuses on what it describes as “impact agrifood.”
Agtech is a sizable opportunity because of labor shortages, and also due to Robovision’s track record — it helps its partner ISO Group plant a billion tulips annually. But other verticals are growing faster for Robovision, Van den Driessche said.
According to Van den Driessche, Robovision is seeing strong traction in life sciences and tech. For instance, Hitachi uses its platform to produce semiconductor wafers. “I don’t think agriculture is going to be the largest sector at scale,” said Bao-Y Van Cong, a partner at Target Global. “I think it’s going to be industrial manufacturing.”
Apple’s recent decision to acquire DarwinAI, an AI startup specializing in overseeing the manufacturing of components, shows rising interest in this space. For Robovision founder Jonathan Berte, it is also a sign that a toolbox that can support a wide variety of different industrialized applications makes more sense. “Apple would never [have bought that] company if it were only a point solution.”
From Ghent to the world
The convertible notes that Robovision raised in 2022 and 2023 following its pivot mostly came from Dutch and Belgian investors, but it had to look further afield to raise the capital it needed. The amount of capital that Robovision raised in the round would have been harder to secure from Benelux, or may have required more dilution.
Robovision’s Belgian roots are paying off in other ways. “The whole early team was very smart people from Ghent university,” Berte said. Van den Driessche became Robovision’s CEO in 2022, and Berte moved his focus to fundraising, partnerships and global expansion.
Robovision’s tech evolution has extended to rethinking the architecture of its computer vision tools in response to customer demand. Because low latency and delivery speed are requirements in certain environments, it launched Robovision Edge.
In today’s market, doing more with less has become key to competing globally. “I think the only way to do that is to innovate and to become more productive,” Van Cong said.