Mithril Capital invests $45m in India's Glance

Glance uses artificial intelligence to customize interactive media content, including videos, games, music, live events coverage, and shopping functions for smart phone users. The company describes the service as “frictionless content” because users do not need to activate an app. The content is launched immediately on the locked home screen of a phone when the handset is illuminated.

“Glance is changing the landscape of content consumption to address the demands of the attention economy we currently live in,” Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of Glance’s parent company InMobi, said in a statement. “By bringing discovery and consumption of personalized, short-form content to screen-zero, Glance provides the immediacy and accessibility that consumers want.”

InMobi positions Glance as a tool for enterprises to engage with consumers at scale. The company claims that 50 million daily active users use the service, which is free-to-use and has no conventional advertising, for an average of 22 minutes per day.  The software is pre-installed on 65% of all new smart phones in India. A Southeast Asian expansion is planned for the coming months.

Thiel set up Mithril in 2012 with Ajay Royan, formerly a managing director at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. Mithril claims about $1.2 billion in committed capital, with recent Asian investments including GreyOrange Robotics, Singapore logistics automation developer. 

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Media
• Expansion
• India
• TMT