InMobi is building a new generation of advertising products designed for an Internet increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI), as the Bengaluru-based adtech firm looks to position itself for the next phase of growth ahead of a planned public listing.
The company is developing 15 new AI-focused advertising formats and opening its advertising infrastructure to AI-powered agents that can buy and sell ad inventory on behalf of brands and agencies, Abhay Singhal, co-founder of InMobi and chief executive of InMobi Advertising, told Mint in an interview.
“We are launching about 15 new ad formats, all built for the AI use cases,” Singhal said. “One of the ad formats that we are launching is actually also aimed towards news publications.” The company processes nearly $2.5 billion of media spend globally, according to Singhal.
This product will target news publishers struggling with declining traffic as consumers turn to AI tools rather than websites for information. The format allows readers to interact with news content through a conversational interface, while advertising is built directly into the experience.
The move reflects a growing belief across the advertising industry that AI could fundamentally change how consumers discover products, research purchases, and interact with brands. InMobi’s advertising arm serves over 30,000 brands and has reached over 2 billion users across 150 countries.
“If you have to go for a vacation now, instead of clicking about 30 links, you are directly asking AI to plan an itinerary,” Singhal said. “Slowly, these options are going to turn into commercial prompts.”
InMobi’s strategy shift comes at a time when the stakes are high for the broader advertising industry, which crossed the $1 trillion mark globally in 2025 and is increasingly dominated by digital formats. According to Redseer Strategy Consultants, digital advertising now accounts for roughly three-fourths of global advertising spending, while most digital advertising is bought and sold through automated systems.
InMobi was founded in 2007 as mKhoj and transitioned in 2008 from an SMS-based search engine to mobile advertising. It last raised $350 million from Varde Partners, Elham Credit Partners and SeaTown Holdings in December 2025. The company is currently engaging with bankers to launch a $500 million IPO in India.
An AI-driven Internet
At the heart of InMobi’s strategy is the idea that advertising will need to evolve as AI assistants become a starting point for online activities such as shopping, travel planning, and product discovery, according to Singhal.
The company has launched what it calls an “agentic buying” capability through its Scope3 partnership. Simply put, media buying—the process through which advertisers purchase ad space across websites and apps—can increasingly be handled by AI systems instead of human planners. These AI agents can automatically compare inventory, negotiate prices, and place campaigns across platforms.
Singhal believes a similar shift will happen on the consumer side. Instead of browsing multiple websites, users may rely on AI assistants to research products and narrow choices before making a purchase decision.
“I’m a firm believer that ad agents will emerge,” Singhal said. “Each brand will end up creating its own advertising agents, and as a consumer, your agent will be discovering different brand agents.”
The company is also embedding AI internally. Singhal said nearly 80% of code at InMobi is now written with AI assistance, while Glance, its consumer-facing lock-screen platform, is using AI to power shopping and content recommendations. Glance has about 200 million users in India and 25 million in the US, and is expected to reach 50 million by year-end, Singhal noted.
Changing market
Analysts see AI changing not just how ads are created and targeted, but also how consumers discover products online. AI is creating entirely new places for advertising to appear as consumers increasingly interact with conversational AI tools instead of traditional search engines and apps.
“AI is also creating an entirely new advertising surface, one where intent is expressed through conversation rather than search queries,” Redseer said in its May 2026 report.
For InMobi, these shifts present both a challenge and an opportunity.
The company makes money by helping advertisers buy digital ads and helping publishers monetize their websites and apps. InMobi operates across the advertising technology stack, earning a share of advertising spending that flows through its platforms while also offering software tools to brands, agencies and publishers.
As InMobi moves closer to a public listing, showing that it can remain relevant in an AI-first advertising ecosystem could become increasingly important for investors. While large platforms such as Google, Meta and OpenAI are building their own AI advertising products, InMobi is betting that its scale in the open internet—outside the biggest technology platforms—will help it capture a share of the next wave of advertising growth.
“Tell me what you can do with AI that you weren’t able to do before,” Singhal said, describing the company’s approach to the technology. “The most precious commodity that is going to be in the world is going to be imagination.”