The Indian ad-tech firm InMobi is likely to power the online advertisement on Microsoft’s search engine Bing globally. The measure is being taken to increase Microsoft’s market share in mobile advertising as the number of Smartphone users are increasing rapidly. Recently, the two companies had announced a partnership that will provide Azure cloud customers’ with marketing insights backed with artificial intelligence. The Bangalore-based startup is backed by a Japanese investment giant SoftBank. The firm is also the largest independent mobile advertising platform with a reach of over 1.5 billion mobile users globally and has expertise in mobile video ads.   

“A lot of discussions are going on about how Microsoft will leverage the InMobi capability, Microsoft India President, Anan Maheswari told ET. “The platform that InMobi has built over the last decade focusing on mobile, advertising and marketing is a deep niche,” he added.

In December 2017, Microsoft introduced an artificial Intelligence driven feature in Bing, which includes better utilization of object recognition like Google lens. Microsoft will sell InMobi’s marketing automation to its enterprise customers; it will allow clients to buy digital and mobile advertising on the same platform. InMobi will transfer all its application to Microsoft’s Azure cloud from a private cloud and monitor its scale globally.

Bing, the world’s second most popular search engine after Google, had 3.24% shares of the global search engine market in May 2018 whereas Google had a 90.14% shares, according to StatCounter Global Stats.

Earlier this year, InMobi had acquired AerServ, a Lost Angeles-based startup, for USD 90 million in cash and stock to build Industry’s first meditation platform. Aerserv deals with inventory and audience monetization technology for mobile publishers. InMobi has around 40,000 to 50,000 enterprise customers and it enables companies to assemble insights into its customer base which helps them estimate market possibilities.