Naveen Sachchidanand Tewari

Naveen Sachchidanand Tewari is an entrepreneur known for founding InMobi, a technology company based in India, and co-founding Glance, a Bangalore-based software company that operates the short-video content platform Roposo. He is also a co-founder of iSPIRT, a think tank for the Indian software products industry and was a board member at Paytm. The government of Uttar Pradesh has awarded him the highest state civilian award, the Uttar Pradesh Gaurav Samman. In 2013, he was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and received two awards including Pathbreaker of the Year and Future Leaders from prime minister of India Narendra Modi. He was also named among the India's top 30 startup founders by Tech in Asia.
Biography
Tewari was born in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. His grandmother, the late Krishna Tewari, taught algebra at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) in the 1960s, while his father taught electrical engineering there in the 1980s. Both his aunt and father-in-law also earned their PhDs from IIT-K. His wife is an engineer. Tewari developed an interest in sports and wanted to pursue a career in sports. However, he ended up becoming a mechanical engineer. Tewari joined McKinsey & Company as a business analyst in 2000. During his tenure, he worked on a project for Mukesh Ambani, who later launched Reliance Jio Infocomm in 2015 after an initial soft launch in 2012. Tewari played a key role in developing the go-to-market strategy for a large Indian conglomerate's entry into the telecom sector. Tewari quit his job to pursue his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he received the Dean's Award for leadership. He then joined Charles River Ventures (CRV), a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage investments in software and communications.
The idea for mKhoj came to him during his time at CRV. He secured a $500,000 investment from Sasha Mirchandani and teamed up with his friends Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, and Mohit Saxena to launch mKhoj in 2007, an SMS-based search and monetization business in Mumbai. It later got rebranded as InMobi. In 2011, the company was reported as the first Indian unicorn startup, valued at one billion dollars after Softbank invested $200 million. In 2019, Tewari co-founded Glance with Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena, and Piyush Shah, a Bangalore-based software firm. It achieved a unicorn status in 2020 when it raised a $145 million funding round.<ref name=":04" />

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