Startup Deep Dive : Glance — how a free lock screen became a $2 billion business that still loses money

Glance is the screen that greets more than 235 million Indians before they even unlock their phone — a lock-screen feed of news, video and shopping that Google and Reliance’s Jio Platforms have together backed at a reported valuation of about $2 billion, roughly ₹19,200 crore (₹19.2 thousand crore) at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics). It has also lost money in every disclosed year of its existence, including ₹929 crore in the most recent one — a loss bigger than the total most Indian startups ever raise.

The two facts sit uneasily together: a company important enough that Reliance and Google underwrite its balance sheet, yet unprofitable enough that its FY24 loss was one-and-a-half times its full-year revenue. Glance’s own answer is that it was never really selling lock-screen space; it was making a long bet on owning the first pixel every Android phone in India shows. That bet’s real test is only now beginning, as the free-distribution phase gives way to the harder job of running a profitable media and commerce business.

Quick facts

What they do

Glance sells a screen, not an app. Its core product replaces the plain lock screen on an Android phone with a scrollable feed of news, sports scores, short videos, casual games and shoppable content that appears the instant the phone is switched on, before the owner even swipes to unlock it — nothing to search for, download or open. It is built into phones by manufacturers rather than installed by users, and it earns money by selling that space to advertisers and, increasingly, to commerce partners riding on the same feed.

• Reach: 235 million active users in India and more than 450 million smartphones enabled with Glance worldwide, as of March 2024 (Glance newsroom, 14 March 2024).
• Distribution: pre-installed through deals with Android’s largest India vendors, including Xiaomi (and POCO), Samsung, Vivo and Oppo (Entrackr, 14 February 2022).
• Group businesses: Roposo, a short-video platform acquired in November 2019 with 42 million users at the time (Glance newsroom, 25 November 2019); Shop101, a social-commerce platform acquired in June 2021 (CB Insights); Gambit, a casual-gaming company reportedly acquired in 2022; and Glance AI, a generative-AI shopping app whose commerce push was elevated under a new COO in September 2025 (Glance newsroom, 2 September 2025).

The origin

Glance’s real origin story starts inside its parent, seven years before Glance existed. InMobi was founded in 2007 in a Bengaluru apartment as mKhoj, a mobile SMS search service, by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal; within a year the founders abandoned SMS search and rebuilt the company as a mobile advertising network under the new name InMobi. The pivot worked spectacularly at first — a $200 million SoftBank investment in 2011 made InMobi India’s first unicorn — but by the middle of the following decade the model was under real strain: InMobi posted losses of $45.5 million in FY15 and $40.9 million in FY16 as Google and Facebook came to dominate the mobile advertising auction, and the company cut roughly 10% of its workforce in April 2016 while chasing profitability.

The lesson the founders drew was structural, not cyclical: as long as InMobi was an intermediary bidding for space inside someone else’s app, its economics would be set by Google’s and Facebook’s rules, not its own. Glance, built quietly inside InMobi from around 2018 and spun off as an independent company in July 2019, was the answer to that problem — a screen the group would own outright, with no app store, publisher or ad auction standing between it and the user (Entrackr, 5 May 2020; Entrackr, 12 July 2022). One of the co-founders who carried that thinking from InMobi into Glance, Piyush Shah, had spent his earlier career at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup after an engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering and an MBA from the Indian School of Business, before joining InMobi’s founding team and later becoming Glance’s President and COO (InMobi leadership page).

The struggle years

Even after the pivot, Glance’s first two years ran almost entirely on faith. It crossed 50 million daily active users by August 2019 and 100 million by May 2020 — but Entrackr’s reporting from that period is blunt that the platform “is not monetizing its users,” with the company choosing to push back advertising by “another one to two quarters” even as it kept adding staff, content deals and gaming features (Entrackr, 5 May 2020). That delay meant years of pure cash outflow before a single rupee of revenue existed to offset it.

The bill came due once monetization did start, and it kept growing rather than shrinking. Glance lost ₹900 crore in FY22 and ₹1,067 crore in FY23, even as revenue grew 77.7% year-on-year to ₹317 crore — a cash-burn ratio of ₹4.46 spent for every ₹1 earned (Entrackr, 16 April 2024). It took until FY24, five years after Glance separated from InMobi, for the annual loss to fall in absolute terms for the first time (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).

The turning point

The single event that changed Glance’s trajectory was Jio Platforms’ decision, announced 14 February 2022, to invest $200 million in the company (Entrackr, 14 February 2022; IBEF, February 2022). Before the round, Glance was a roughly one-year-old unicorn valued at just over $1 billion after Google and Mithril Capital’s December 2020 investment, with a user base of about 180-190 million concentrated mostly in India and a handful of other Asian markets (Entrackr, 22 December 2020; Entrackr, 12 July 2022). After it, the reported valuation roughly doubled to about $2 billion — though Entrackr’s later analysis of the round’s actual share price implied a valuation closer to $1.6-1.7 billion (Entrackr, 12 July 2022) — and, more importantly, Glance gained something capital alone could not buy: a bundling deal onto Reliance’s JioPhone Next devices, a partnership with Reliance Retail, and an explicit mandate to expand into the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Russia (IBEF, February 2022). A distribution strategy that had depended on negotiating with Android device-makers one at a time suddenly had a second, far larger channel: India’s biggest telecom and retail conglomerate.

The money behind it

• September 2019 — $45 million from Mithril Capital, the seed-stage capital that let Glance chase daily-active-user growth (past 50 million) months before it sold a single advertisement (InMobi advertising press release, 10 September 2019).
• 22 December 2020 — $145 million from Google and Mithril Capital, pushing the valuation above $1 billion and unicorn status; Google’s entry gave Glance both capital and closer standing within the Android ecosystem its distribution depends on (Global Venturing, 23 December 2020; Entrackr, 22 December 2020).
• 14 February 2022 — $200 million from Jio Platforms (Reliance), lifting the reported valuation to about $2 billion and unlocking the JioPhone Next/Reliance Retail bundling deal described above (IBEF, February 2022; Entrackr, 14 February 2022).
• Total disclosed equity raised across these three rounds: $390 million (Entrackr’s captable analysis, 12 July 2022).
• February 2025 — Entrackr reported Glance was raising ₹200 crore in debt rather than fresh equity, a shift in capital structure as the company pushed toward profitability (Entrackr, 28 February 2025).
• Post-Series D ownership: InMobi Pte Ltd 50.45%, Jio Platforms 20.27%, Mithril II LP 18.03%, Google 10.13% (Entrackr, 12 July 2022; corroborated in Entrackr’s FY23 filing report, 16 April 2024).

How it makes money

Glance runs two revenue engines on top of one distribution asset: the lock screen itself.

• Advertising: brands buy space on the lock-screen feed and inside Roposo’s video content. This is still the larger business — ₹336 crore in FY24, 54.7% of revenue, up 35.7% from ₹248 crore a year earlier (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• Commerce (“shoppertainment”): shoppable video and social-commerce transactions, built substantially on the 2021 Shop101 acquisition, contributed ₹254 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• A small financial-income line, mostly interest on cash reserves, added ₹15.9 crore (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• On costs: employee benefits were ₹444 crore in FY24, including ₹71.4 crore of ESOP charges; marketing and selling cost ₹436 crore; shipping for the commerce business cost ₹200 crore; and infrastructure/cloud cost ₹201 crore, against total expenses of ₹1,569 crore (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• The part people get wrong: because Glance is pre-installed and free to the phone owner, it looks like a business with almost no acquisition cost. It is not — marketing and selling spend (₹436 crore) is nearly as large as the entire employee cost base, meaning a large paid-distribution and demand-generation bill sits behind every “free” install (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss, in ₹ crore, as reported by Glance’s Singapore holding entity and covered by Entrackr from regulatory filings.

Entrackr’s later FY24 report restated the FY23 comparatives slightly, to ₹325 crore revenue and a ₹1,094 crore loss (Entrackr, 21 November 2024). The table above uses each year’s original filing-based report — Entrackr, 16 April 2024, for FY22 and FY23, and Entrackr, 21 November 2024, for FY24.

Where the money comes from

• Advertising: ₹336 crore, 54.7% of FY24 revenue (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• Commerce/shoppertainment: ₹254 crore, built on the June 2021 acquisition of Shop101, which brought a network of 10 million resellers and 10,000 supplier partners across more than 2,000 Indian towns (CB Insights; Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• Financial income: ₹15.9 crore (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).
• Geography: no country-wise revenue split is disclosed, but the user base is overwhelmingly India-anchored — 235 million of Glance’s active users are in India against more than 450 million smartphones enabled globally (Glance newsroom, 14 March 2024) — so the international push funded by Jio’s 2022 investment remains, on the numbers available, a users-first rather than a revenue-first bet.
• The surprise: shoppertainment, a segment that barely existed before the 2021 Shop101 deal, already contributes more than four in every ten rupees of revenue — commerce, not advertising, is now Glance’s fastest-growing line (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).

The risks

• Persistent unprofitability: FY24 revenue grew 89% year-on-year, but the company still lost ₹929 crore against ₹614 crore of revenue, and total expenses of ₹1,569 crore ran to more than double revenue; FY23’s cash-burn ratio was ₹4.46 spent for every ₹1 earned (Entrackr, 21 November 2024; Entrackr, 16 April 2024). A shift toward debt — Entrackr reported a ₹200 crore debt raise in February 2025, instead of fresh equity — suggests investors want the loss curve to keep bending before writing another large equity cheque (Entrackr, 28 February 2025).
• Distribution concentration: Glance’s scale rests on being pre-installed by a small set of Android device-makers, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo and Oppo (Entrackr, 14 February 2022), rather than on users actively choosing to download it. Losing or renegotiating even one of those relationships, or a change in how Google permits OEMs to bundle non-Google software on Android, could remove Glance from a large share of its device base at once — a risk that does not apply to an app people seek out for themselves.
• Data and regulatory exposure: Glance’s product works by continuously reading a phone’s lock screen, which typically means constant access to location and usage signals across hundreds of millions of devices. Its own controlling shareholder has direct history here — InMobi paid a $950,000 civil penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission on 22 June 2016 after being charged with tracking hundreds of millions of consumers’ locations, including children’s, without consent (FTC press release, 22 June 2016). The same category of data practice sits at the centre of Glance’s business, now under India’s newer data-protection law and the separate regulatory regimes of the overseas markets it is entering.

The takeaway

Glance’s decade offers a lesson that has little to do with lock screens specifically: winning distribution is not the same as winning the business. Being pre-installed on hundreds of millions of Android phones solved the hardest problem most consumer startups face — getting in front of users at all — years before Glance had to answer the far duller question of what it costs to keep them there and turn their attention into profit. Google’s capital, Jio’s phones and Reliance’s retail network could buy Glance scale and legitimacy, but none of it could buy an income statement that balances; that is still being built, one fiscal year at a time, long after the free-install phase stopped being the hard part.

Frequently asked questions

Is Glance the same company as InMobi?

No. Glance was built inside InMobi Group and spun off as an independent entity in July 2019; InMobi remains its largest shareholder, holding 50.45% as of its FY23 filings (Entrackr, 12 July 2022; Entrackr, 16 April 2024).

Is Glance profitable?

No. Glance reported a net loss of ₹929 crore in FY24 on revenue of ₹614 crore, though the loss narrowed 15% from the prior year as reported in the same filing (Entrackr, 21 November 2024).

What is Glance’s latest disclosed valuation?

Glance was widely reported to be valued at about $2 billion after Jio Platforms invested $200 million in February 2022, though Entrackr’s own analysis of the round’s share price implied a valuation closer to $1.6-1.7 billion (Entrackr, 14 February 2022; Entrackr, 12 July 2022; IBEF, February 2022). No newer equity valuation has been publicly disclosed since.

Does Glance still own Roposo?

Yes. Glance acquired the short-video platform Roposo in November 2019, when it had 42 million users, and has since folded much of its video content into Glance’s own shoppable-video and shoppertainment push rather than growing Roposo as a standalone app (Glance newsroom, 25 November 2019; Entrackr, 21 November 2024).

Is Glance listed on any stock exchange?

No. Glance is privately held. Its parent, InMobi, has separately been reported to be preparing for an Indian stock-market listing, but that process is distinct from Glance’s own ownership and financials.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “InMobi’s Glance records 77% growth in FY23; losses cross Rs 1,000 Cr” — April 2024
• Entrackr, “Glance crosses Rs 600 Cr revenue in FY24 with improved economics” — November 2024
• Entrackr, “Decoding Glance Series D round and captable” — July 2022
• Entrackr, “Jio Platforms to invest $200 Mn in Google-backed Glance” — February 2022
• Entrackr, “Google leads $145 Mn round in InMobi’s Glance” — December 2020
• Entrackr, “InMobi’s Glance crosses 100 Mn DAU, India emerges biggest market” — May 2020
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: InMobi’s Glance set to raise Rs 200 Cr debt” — February 2025
• InMobi (advertising.inmobi.com), “Glance Raises $45 Million Investment From Mithril Capital As It Crosses 50 Million Daily Active Users” — September 2019
• IBEF, “Glance Raises $200mn From Jio Platforms; Partners With Reliance Retail” — February 2022
• Global Venturing, “Glance greets Google in $145m round” — December 2020
• TechCrunch, “India’s Glance tops 100M daily active users in 21 months” — May 2020
• US Federal Trade Commission, press release on the InMobi settlement — June 2016
• Glance newsroom, “Glance Acquires Video Platform Roposo” — November 2019
• Glance newsroom, “India is glancing: Over 235 million active users…” — March 2024
• Glance newsroom, “Mansi Jain Elevated as COO of Glance to Spearhead Global Expansion of AI Commerce” — September 2025
• InMobi, leadership pages for Naveen Tewari and Piyush Shah — accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, company profile for Shop101 — accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “InMobi” and “Glance (company)” — accessed September 2026, used for founding-team and acquisition-date cross-checks only

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