Key Takeaways
- InMobi acquires San Francisco-based MobileAction to absorb AI-driven iOS app analytics and round out its full-stack ad platform
- Glance, InMobi's consumer agentic commerce platform, anchors the new Ad Experiences solution that combines 350M consumers with a 2.2B+ ad reach
- Ahead of its 2026 IPO, InMobi leans on 8M US shopping-agent users and roughly 1.2M monthly buyers as proof of its agentic commerce traction
InMobi's bet on fusing advertising and commerce
InMobi launched Ad Experiences, an enhanced full-funnel solution through Glance, its consumer agentic AI platform.
www.forbes.comIn a span of just two weeks, India-born mobile adtech leader InMobi has rolled out two significant moves. The first was the April 29, 2026 launch of "InMobi Ad Experiences," a new full-funnel advertising solution. The second, announced on May 7, was the acquisition of San Francisco-based MobileAction. At first glance the announcements look separate, but CEO Naveen Tewari frames them as two halves of a single full-stack strategy that pairs a consumer agentic commerce platform with a global advertising platform.
Financial terms of the MobileAction deal were not disclosed. With InMobi targeting a $4–5 billion domestic IPO in India during 2026, the timing reinforces a clear pre-listing playbook: bolt on agentic advertising capabilities and an iOS-app growth platform before going public. As Tewari told Forbes, the goal is to "go deeper into the Apple ecosystem to really support the developers to access consumers in a more efficient manner."
Who is MobileAction?
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, MobileAction is a specialist AI platform focused on App Store Optimization (ASO) and Apple Search Ads (ASA).
Its dataset spans 90 million creatives, 6 million keywords, 5 million apps, 100,000 publishers, and 500,000 advertisers. Global names such as Google, Meta, DoorDash, Square, Zalando, Playtika, and Priceline use the platform as their backbone for ASO and Apple Search Ads optimization.
At the core of the product is a structured workflow platform for Apple Search Ads campaigns: cross-storefront bid optimization, more than twenty automation templates, statistically robust A/B testing, and tight integration with ASO Intelligence. Together these elevate app advertising from a manual, intuition-driven exercise into a data-driven optimization layer.
Post-acquisition, MobileAction continues to operate as a dedicated platform, with its teams across the US, Europe, and Turkey joining the InMobi Group. InMobi plans to deepen investment in MobileAction's product roadmap and go-to-market reach, with particular focus on the US, APAC, and MENA.
How Ad Experiences and Glance fit together
The other side of the story is "InMobi Ad Experiences," the full-funnel solution unveiled at the end of April.
Its differentiation rests on combining first-party data from Glance — InMobi's consumer agentic commerce platform — with nearly two decades of programmatic ad infrastructure. Tewari summarized the edge to Forbes as follows.
At the core of InMobi Ad Experiences is a differentiated data model that sets us apart from the broader ad industry. It combines exclusive access to Glance's 350 million global users with InMobi's advertising reach of 2 billion-plus users worldwide
Fossil signed on as the inaugural brand partner, deploying Ad Experiences for the BIG TIC spring campaign — a Y2K-inspired watch. According to Marketing Dive, users exposed to Fossil creative on premium video inventory showed a 57% lift in brand recall versus an unexposed control group, and brand awareness rose 10%. The campaign also generated 21 million agentic-advertising impressions.
The implication is significant. "Agents embedded in the shows" is how Tewari described the architecture — an approach that aims to convert every piece of content into both a point of inspiration and a point of sale, blurring the line between viewing and buying.
Why MobileAction, and why now?
The strategic logic of the MobileAction deal goes well beyond simple market expansion.
First, deeper penetration of the Apple ecosystem. Glance built its consumer footprint around Android lock screens, leaving iOS-app advertising and analytics relatively underweight inside InMobi's portfolio. MobileAction plugs that gap by giving InMobi a full-stack position in Apple Search Ads, App Store Optimization, and iOS app advertising — categories with persistently strong revenue dynamics.
Second, an expansion of the underlying data layer. Ad Experiences leans on Glance's first-party consumer data, while MobileAction holds a deep reservoir of advertiser and publisher campaign data. Stitching the two together gives InMobi a rare end-to-end view spanning consumer discovery, consideration, and purchase — a vantage point few competitors can match.
Third, stronger relationships with global advertisers. MobileAction's existing customer roster includes both tech giants like Google and Meta and commerce-and-services brands like DoorDash and Zalando. InMobi can use those relationships as a launchpad to upsell and cross-sell its agentic advertising stack into accounts that already trust the MobileAction product.
Glance as agentic commerce: 8M users, 1.2M monthly buyers
Glance is rapidly shifting from a lock-screen media product into an AI-native commerce platform.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Glance global users | 350M |
| InMobi advertising reach | 2.2B+ |
| US shopping-agent users on Glance | 8M |
| Monthly buyers via shopping agents | ~1.2M |
| Cumulative InMobi investment in Glance AI | $200M |
| Glance cumulative funding / valuation | $390M / $1.7B |
Tewari put the trajectory bluntly to Forbes: "We're the largest agentic shopping platform on the planet today and the fastest-growing. There are 8 million users in the U.S. and about 1.2 million people per month are buying through their shopping agents. It's an unbelievable scale in a short period of time, less than 7 or 8 months."
The underlying technology stack centers on low-latency, high-quality, low-cost image generation, with Glance AI delivering virtual try-on as a flagship use case that replaces search-led shopping with inspiration-led discovery. Forrester VP and principal analyst Sucharita Kodali offered a candid read: "Glance is definitely interesting. You've got virtual try on for almost anything and that's pretty cool. I haven't seen that before. Their legacy is in Asia Pacific. They have distribution deals with the big screens. Big props to them for getting this far with a solution that's credible." At the same time, Kodali flagged the open question: "Their challenge is to get people to keep coming back to Glance and ultimately get people to buy. It's still very, very early days with respect to that." The throughput from view to purchase is, in other words, the next milestone to watch.
Implications for retailers and advertisers
InMobi's combined moves carry several implications for agentic commerce strategies in advertising and e-commerce.
The line between advertising and commerce keeps dissolving. Brand advertising at the top of the funnel and performance advertising at the bottom used to live in separate buying conversations. Agentic ads and shopping agents are now stitching them together. Fossil's campaign delivered a 57% lift in brand recall and 21M agentic-ad impressions in the same execution — proof that a single program can chase brand and conversion outcomes simultaneously.
First-party consumer scale becomes scarcer and more valuable. With privacy regulation and cookie deprecation tightening, players like Glance — built around 350 million owned consumers — sit on a structurally advantageous data position. Advertisers will increasingly evaluate Glance alongside other retail media networks such as Amazon, Walmart Connect, and TikTok Shop, weighing data depth against media scale.
iOS app advertising emerges as an agentic-era frontier. The MobileAction acquisition signals that the Apple ecosystem still has significant headroom. Apple Search Ads and ASO are key signals that AI agents will lean on when deciding which apps and products to surface. Investments in structured metadata and creative optimization should be treated as continuous with data readiness for agentic commerce — they belong to the same problem set.
That said, Glance AI's monetization is still early. InMobi expects Glance revenue to match its core advertising business within two years, but the transition from lock-screen media to commerce platform will be proven or disproven over the next 12–24 months of operating data.
Summary
The back-to-back announcements — MobileAction acquisition and Ad Experiences launch — mark InMobi's rebrand of itself from "Asian mobile ad company" into "global agentic commerce and advertising platform." 350M consumers, 2.2B advertising reach, and now a specialist iOS app-growth platform: bundling those into one stack creates a fourth option alongside Google, Amazon, and TikTok that advertisers can no longer ignore.
With an IPO planned for 2026, InMobi is methodically assembling the global agentic-advertising stack it needs at listing. The signals to watch next are real engagement and purchase data from Glance AI in the US and India, MobileAction's revenue contribution from Apple Search Ads, and how InMobi's partnerships evolve relative to other agentic commerce players like Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI, and Google. For brands and retailers, the timing has arrived to decide where "agentic advertising" sits inside the broader media mix and data strategy.
