How Reliance’s Legacy of Audacity Shaped InMobi and Naveen Tewari’s Vision

Before InMobi became India’s first unicorn and a global name in adtech, its co-founder and CEO Naveen Tewari had already absorbed lessons in vision and scale from the corridors of Reliance.

In the early 2000s, as a young consultant at McKinsey, Tewari worked closely with Mukesh Ambani and his leadership team on Reliance Infocom — the group’s bold entry into telecom. At just 23, he was the youngest person in the room — a self-described “note taker” attending meetings six days a week for nearly 18 months.

What began as a consulting project became an intense education in what it meant to think and build at scale. One particular meeting, he recalls, redefined his understanding of ambition.

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When the McKinsey team estimated that phone calls would cost between ₹1 and ₹1.50 per minute, Ambani dismissed the numbers instantly. “I need this to be ten paisa,” he said — a statement that stunned everyone in the room but perfectly captured his mindset.

“Everyone was assuming a certain scale of users. He said, ‘If I make it ten paisa, the number of users will multiply twentyfold.’ He wasn’t constrained by existing data — he imagined a world that didn’t exist yet and then challenged everyone to make it real,” Tewari shared in a recent podcast with Varun Mayya.

“I would sit in meetings with Mukesh Ambani and Manoj Modi for six hours a day, watching them think and build. Their ability to imagine what no one else could see — and then have the courage and tenacity to make it happen — was unlike anything I’d experienced. They weren’t just building a business; they were attempting something the world had never seen.”

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That early exposure to bold thinking would later shape the foundation of InMobi — a company that dared to compete with global advertising giants and proved that Indian innovation could scale globally.

Two decades later, that connection came full circle when Jio Platforms invested $200 million in Glance, InMobi’s consumer internet arm delivering AI-powered content experiences on smartphone lock screens.

“When Jio got to know we were raising money for Glance, they already understood the vision. They saw it as a chance to back an audacious idea — building a global consumer platform from India, something no one had done before,” said Tewari.

“At that time, Jio was also planning to launch its own handsets. They saw how Glance could integrate deeply into that ecosystem. After the first meeting, they said they wanted to invest the entire $200 million we were raising. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner.”

For Tewari, the partnership with Jio was more than strategic — it was symbolic. It brought his journey full circle, linking the bold lessons learned at Reliance’s boardroom two decades ago to the global ambitions he continues to pursue through InMobi and Glance today.