The company has named JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jefferies Financial Group Inc. as well as local investment banks Kotak Mahindra Capital Co. and Axis Capital Ltd. for the IPO process that’s due to kick off later this week, people familiar with the matter said, declining to be named as the information is private.
The SoftBank Group Corp.-backed firm is likely to seek a valuation of $5 billion to $6 billion in a share offering, Bloomberg News reported last year, which would place it in the mid-range of Indian publicly traded tech firms.
Spokespeople for InMobi, JPMorgan and Jefferies declined to comment, while Kotak and Axis didn’t respond to requests for comment.
InMobi is currently in the process of re-domiciling to India from Singapore for the public listing. The plans are not final and could change.
Public listings such as InMobi’s would be a boon for an Indian IPO market that has waned this year, with geopolitical turmoil derailing or delaying stock sales. About $5 billion has been raised through Indian IPOs this year, well behind the pace of the previous two record-setting years, when proceeds topped $20 billion each, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Still, there are high-profile names including National Stock Exchange of India Ltd., Zepto Ltd., Jio Platforms Ltd. and Manipal Health Enterprises Ltd. in the pipeline.
Founded in 2007, InMobi was one of India’s earliest global consumer-tech bets and briefly positioned as a challenger to Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. in mobile advertising. SoftBank invested in the company in 2011, creating India’s first unicorn. The company has since diversified into marketing, content and commerce technologies, and has been working to bolster profitability after years of slower growth.
SoftBank recently sold a large portion of its stake in InMobi back to the company for about $250 million. It still holds a small stake in the firm. Harvard-educated founder Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s chief executive officer and largest shareholder with about 40% stake.