Mobvista to invest $100 million in India: Wei Duan

By Nandita Singh

BENGALURU: Barely two-year-old mobile advertising company, Mobvista of Chinese origin, has announced an investment of $100 million in India by December 2018.

Founded in 2013, led by Founder & CEO Wei Duan, Mobvista customer list has already accumulated 20 Indian clients including Flipkart, PayTM, OLX, Jabong, Freecharge, Yatra and Newshunt and is raring to more than double the number.

Globally, Mobvista has 500 advertisers and 2,000 publishers on board and a market valuation of over a billion USD to its credit.

The company recently raised its second round of financing of 200 million RMB from an undisclosed media firm in China. The initial round A of funding of $10 million for Mobvista came in 2014 from NetEase Inc., a China-based Internet technology company that pioneered the development of applications, services and other technologies for the Internet in China.

Currently, Mobvista delivers over 10 billion daily ad impressions in more than 230 countries providing advertisers and developers with comprehensive solutions to high quality user’s acquisition, performance marketing and traffic monetization.

According to CEO Wei Duan, who is upbeat about the opportunity and the company’s capability to leverage it, Mobvista has a definitive role of India in their business and would soon be opening an India office, in Gurgaon. Wei Duan, has a close connect with Gurgaon. He worked at UCWeb India and was stationed at Gurgaon for a year. According to him, Gurgaon is a good fit in terms of talent pool and connectivity to Guangzhou. The company currently has offices in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing and San Francisco in the US. “Along with China and US, India will join the list of Top 3 markets for us,” said Wei Duan.

“We are witnessing a steep growth in India and we are determined to draw more attention, resources and focus required to sustain and build upon this momentum. At this rate, we are very positive that we will have more and more domestic companies in India turning to Mobvista in the coming days,” he added.

The company has a remarkable advertiser list in its home country China including majors such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent along with innovative startups like Qiigame, Apus and Leomaster.

Yang Yang, the Vice President of Business Development of mobile Internet service company Leomaster who was accompanying Wei Duan was also very upbeat about the uptake of its first product Leo Privacy Guard in the India market. Leo Privacy Guard is an application management tool that enables you to lock your apps, photos and videos allowing you to customize privacy settings on the Andriod device. Leomaster is working closely with Mobvista to leverage the market opportunity in India.

A number of Chinese origin startups are participating in the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) Bengaluru, which is in its second edition in India, and is scheduled for September 10, 2015 at Taj Vivanta in Yeshwantpur.