How Building InMobi And Glance Shaped Piyush Shah’s Bold Vision For India’s Growing AI Future
Piyush Shah helped build InMobi into India’s first unicorn, then built Glance into a lock screen platform reaching hundreds of millions of phones, and now argues the same instinct, meeting users exactly where they already are, will define India’s AI future.
Highlights:
- Piyush Shah cofounded InMobi in 2007 and later cofounded Glance, now president and COO, in 2019
- Glance reached 100 million users in just 21 months, the fastest ever for a global consumer platform
- The platform now operates across more than 400 million smartphone lock screens worldwide
- Shah has described Glance’s ambition as building an operating system for digital surfaces beyond just phones
- InMobi Group reported revenue of 281 million dollars and net income of 41 million dollars in FY23
Every smartphone user unlocks their phone somewhere between one hundred and two hundred times a day, mostly without thinking about it. Piyush Shah has spent nearly two decades building companies around the idea that this single, unconscious habit is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in modern technology.
Shah cofounded InMobi in 2007, a company that would go on to become India’s first unicorn, before later cofounding Glance in 2019, an AI powered lock screen platform where he now serves as President and Chief Operating Officer. Across both ventures, a single, consistent instinct runs through nearly everything he has built, meet users exactly where their attention already naturally goes, rather than asking them to go somewhere new.
“We wanted to build something incredibly convenient for individuals always on the go,” Shah has said, explaining the inception of Glance. “Three years back, we saw something on the lock screen of phones that no one else could. As a user, everyone looks at their lock screen at least 100 to 200 times a day, either for a notification or a weather update.”
That observation became the foundation for what Glance calls screen zero, the idea that the lock screen itself, the surface every phone user encounters before ever opening a single app, is an overlooked, genuinely powerful medium for content, commerce, and engagement, rather than simply a security gate standing between a user and their apps.
The traction that idea generated moved considerably faster than most consumer technology products ever manage. Glance crossed 100 million users in just 21 months, the shortest timeline ever recorded for any consumer platform globally to reach that scale, according to the company. By the second quarter of 2021, the platform had grown to 150 million active users in India alone, according to Counterpoint Research’s tracking, meaning roughly one in every four Indian smartphone users was actively engaging with Glance’s lock screen experience. The platform has since scaled considerably further, now operating across more than 400 million smartphone lock screens worldwide, spanning markets including India, Brazil, Japan, and the United States.
Reflecting on his early instincts about where consumer attention was heading, Shah pointed to a fundamental shift in what people actually want from their devices. “This is not just a feature but a fundamental shift in how users engage with their devices,” he said, describing Glance’s broader ambition as extending well beyond the smartphone itself.
That ambition, Shah has argued, is really about surfaces rather than devices specifically. “Consider Glance as the Internet of Surfaces, where we’re essentially creating an operating system for digital surfaces,” he has said, describing a vision that extends the same lock screen logic across tablets, smartwatches, and smart televisions, any digital surface a user glances at reflexively, rather than confining the platform’s ambitions to phones alone.
Shah’s path to building this vision did not begin in consumer technology at all. Before InMobi, he worked at Deutsche Bank, where he was part of the core team establishing the firm’s payments and private banking business in India, and earlier at Citigroup as a product manager, corporate finance experience that shaped how he has approached building genuinely large scale platforms rather than simply chasing viral growth. At InMobi itself, Shah built the company’s Marketing Cloud into what colleagues have described as a world class product organisation, led its performance advertising business, and helped launch InMobi SmartPay, a mobile payments initiative, before turning his focus fully toward Glance.
Describing how AI now factors into that broader vision, InMobi cofounder Naveen Tewari, working alongside Shah, has framed the technology’s role in explicitly ambitious terms. “Our mission is to fundamentally change the way consumers interact with their smartphones, leveraging AI to bring content directly to users without needing them to search for it,” Tewari said, describing AI’s potential to eventually propel Glance toward a billion users.
The financial scale underlying this vision gives some sense of the resources behind it. InMobi Group, the broader company Shah helped build from its 2007 founding, reported revenue of 281 million dollars and net income of 41 million dollars in FY23, backed by roughly 2,500 employees globally, figures that reflect a genuinely mature, profitable technology company rather than an early stage venture still searching for a sustainable business model.
It is worth applying a fair amount of scrutiny to how Shah’s AI framing should actually be read, rather than treating a founder’s own description of his platform’s mission as an objective assessment of its impact. Glance’s business model depends directly on capturing and monetising user attention at the exact moment someone glances at their phone, primarily through advertising and content partnerships, meaning Shah’s own framing of AI as bringing content directly to users without needing them to search for it is also, quite directly, a description of Glance’s core revenue mechanism. That does not make the underlying product observation wrong, lock screen attention genuinely is a real and previously underexploited surface, but it is worth remembering that the executive articulating this vision for India’s AI future is also the person whose company profits most directly from AI mediated attention capture succeeding at scale.
There is also a fair question worth holding about how this vision fits into an increasingly crowded competitive landscape for AI mediated content discovery. Major platforms including Google, Meta, and a growing wave of AI native startups are all racing toward similar territory, using AI to surface relevant content to users with less explicit searching required, and Glance’s specific advantage, its unusually deep OEM partnerships that make it a pre installed, default experience on Android devices across India and other markets, is a genuine structural moat, but one that depends heavily on continued cooperation from device manufacturers who could, in principle, choose different default partners as the competitive landscape shifts.
None of this diminishes the genuine, well documented substance behind what Shah has actually built across two ventures spanning nearly twenty years. A founder who helped create India’s first unicorn, then built a second platform that reached hundreds of millions of users faster than almost any consumer product in history, has earned real credibility speaking about where consumer attention and AI are converging. Whether his specific vision, an AI powered operating system spanning every digital surface a person glances at, becomes the dominant paradigm for how Indians and the world engage with AI generated content, or whether it remains one compelling, commercially motivated vision among several competing for the same underlying opportunity, is a question the next phase of Glance’s own growth, not Shah’s own description of his ambitions, will ultimately answer.
