Kleiner Perkins' Mike Abbott joins InMobi board of directors

Bangalore and San Francisco-based mobile ad network InMobi has announced that Mike Abbott, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and also an investor in InMobi, has joined the company's board of directors. Abbott will be intimately involved with the company's direction and will act as a strategic advisor on key strategic initiatives.

With more than two decades of experience in engineering and helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors, Abbot had also worked with Twitter, Palm, Microsoft and other companies.

Commenting on his new role, Abbot said, "InMobi is at the centre of the evolution, leading the innovation and building the tremendous global scale necessary to help advertisers, agencies, publishers and developers seize this opportunity and create engaging user experiences."

Naveen Tewari, CEO and founder of InMobi, commented, "We are very happy to have Mike on our board of directors. He brings a wealth of mobile expertise from his leadership at high-growth companies, and we value his experience and collaboration as we grow our suite of solutions and drive innovation across the entire mobile ecosystem."

InMobi has already made a number of key hires this year. Earlier, the company appointed Shrikant Latkar as vice-president (global marketing), Anita Swan as regional marketing director for the Asia-Pacific and followed it up by bringing on board Sandeep Deshpande as the country general manager for India and Vishal Nongbet as business head of brands.

InMobi caters to advertisers, publishers and developers globally, and is backed by investors including SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. Last year, it had struck the largest deal in the mobile internet space in India with $200 million commitment from Japan's Softbank Corp. InMobi has offices in India, the UK and the US, as well as in other global locations, and it has recently expanded its footprint in Asia, Europe and Australia.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)