Glance, part of mobile-advertising company InMobi, has raised $45 million (about Rs 323 crore) from Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel’s growth-stage investment firm Mithril Capital.
Mithril’s investment in Glance anchors a larger financing round, InMobi said in a statement, without elaborating.
The new funds will enable Glance to launch multiple new platforms and expand into Southeast Asia in coming months, InMobi said.
These include Glance TV, a mobile-first, short-form video platform; Glance Gaming for casual gamers; Glance Shopping; and Glance Nearby, a hyperlocal experiential platform.
As part of Mithril’s investment, co-founder Ajay Royan has joined the Glance board.
Glance is a platform that delivers artificial intelligence-driven content right off the locked screen, or what it calls screen zero. The lock screen comes alive with new visual and interactive content that is personalized for customers when they lift their smartphones. The company said it has partnered with major Android phone makers in India the offer the screen zero experience.
In India, Glance is available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages. It is also available in Bahasa in Indonesia. It claims to have 50 million daily active users.
“Glance… is a powerful innovation to democratize content and commerce on the mobile Internet,” said Royan. “We share Glance’s global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and engaging experiences across a myriad of cultures and languages.”
InMobi Group founder and CEO Naveen Tewari said that, by bringing discovery and consumption of personalized, short-form content to screen zero, Glance provides the immediacy and accessibility that consumers want.
Mithril Capital was co-founded by Thiel and Ajay Royan. The investment firm invests across regions and sectors. Last year, Mithril Capital had led a Series C funding round in Singapore- and Gurugram-based robotics startup GreyOrange.
