IIT graduates are leading a few of the biggest companies in India and many of the startups led by the geniuses from IIT have become unicorns in the past couple of years. For those who don’t know, a startup gets recognition as a unicorn when its valuation crosses 1 billion dollars. Although we see startup companies becoming unicorns every other month now, it was a rare feat a decade ago. In 2011, India got its first unicorn startup company and it was founded by an IIT graduate genius who left his high paying job in Silicon Valley to start his own company. The IIT alumnus that we are talking about is Naveen Tewari, founder of InMobi, India’s first unicorn startup company. Naveen along with his partners Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal founded mKhoj in 2007 and it was later rebranded as InMobin 2008. Its founders started the company out of a residential apartment in Bangalore.
Naveen Tewari has a Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT) and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he was also bestowed with the Dean’s Award, for his exceptional leadership and contribution. In 2013, his alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur also honored him with the esteemed ‘Distinguished Alumnus Award’ for his excellence in entrepreneurship.
He started his career at McKinsey & Company, where he worked on developing the go-to-market strategy for a large Indian conglomerate's entry into the telecom sector. He also worked briefly with a mobile VoIP startup in Silicon Valley.
Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, has made it the largest independent mobile advertising network in the world. Today, the company has set up businesses across US, Europe, China, Japan, Australia and Asia-Pacific region. It is backed by some of the industry's highly regarded investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and SoftBank.
