Glance, India’s third largest content platform with 50 million daily active users, has raised $45 million investment from Mithril Capital, a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel.

Glance is part of the InMobi Group, which also includes InMobi Marketing Cloud and TruFactor. The company delivers artificial intelligence-driven, personalised content to screen zero of smartphones. Every time a user wakes up their phone, their lock screen comes alive with new visual and interactive content that is personalised for them. Glance has partnered with all the leading Android phone makers in India to deliver a universal screen zero experience. As of August 2019, it has more than 50 million daily active users who spend 22 minutes per day on the platform.

The new funds will enable Glance to launch multiple new platforms, including Glance TV -- a mobile-first, short form video platform; Glance Gaming -- a destination for casual gamers; Glance Shopping, where content meets commerce; and Glance Nearby -- a hyperlocal experiential platform. The company will also use the funds to expand into Southeast Asia in the coming months. In conjunction with Mithril’s investment, Royan has joined the Glance board.

Designed with a mobile and video-first approach, Glance is currently available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in India, and Bahasa in Indonesia. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Mithril Capital has over $1.2 billion in committed capital.

“Glance is a powerful innovation to democratise content and commerce on the mobile Internet,” Royan said in a statement. “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,” he added.

“Glance is changing the landscape of content consumption to address the demands of the ‘attention economy’ we currently live in. By bringing discovery and consumption of personalised, short-form content to screen zero, Glance provides the immediacy and accessibility that consumers want,” said Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO, InMobi Group.

First Published:Sept 10, 2019 3:05 PM IST