Summary:
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Naveen Tiwari became a unicorn without knowing what it meant; now he’s pioneering agentic commerce with Glance.
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By creating AI-powered agents for shopping, Tiwari aims to revolutionize how consumers shop and how creators get paid.
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He plans to launch a creator platform that allows influencers to teach the AI their aesthetic for a share of transactions.
Naveen Tiwari didn’t know what a unicorn was for nearly six months after becoming one.
“People would come and say, ‘Hey, congratulations, you’re a unicorn,'” the founder and CEO of InMobi and now Glance recalled on a recent episode of The AI Download with host Shira Lazar. “I kind of just walked away. I just didn’t know what it meant.”
That was 2011. InMobi, the mobile advertising platform Tiwari built out of Bangalore starting in 2007, had just become India’s first startup valued at over $1 billion. He did it again with Glance, an AI-powered shopping agent now used by 10 million consumers in the U.S., making him the first Indian entrepreneur to build two unicorns.
Now he’s working on something that could reshape how consumers shop, how brands reach them, and crucially, how creators get paid.
The concept is known as agentic commerce: AI agents that don’t just answer questions or surface products, but actively help consumers discover, compare, and ultimately purchase items on their behalf.
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Glance is built around eliminating the prompt entirely. Instead of typing out what you want, you upload a photo of yourself, and the app uses generative AI to render clothing recommendations directly on your body, then tells you where to buy each item at the most optimized price. “Prompting is not easy,” Tiwari said. “It’s very expensive. The machines go berserk trying to understand what you’re really trying to say.” Visuals short-circuit that problem. The company started in fashion, since personal categories generate more user input and train the model faster, with beauty, pets, and travel coming next.
The piece that should matter most to creators is coming next year. Tiwari announced plans for a creator platform that would let influencers fine-tune the Glance model with their own aesthetic, essentially teaching the AI to shop the way they do. Every time a community member completes a transaction through that lens, the creator earns a share. “The agent from your community is called upon, you get a share of that transaction,” he said. It’s a direct answer to a tension that has been building for years. Many creators feel AI companies have trained on publicly available content without compensation, leaving them with little control or economic upside. Tiwari’s argument is that the right move isn’t resistance.
“The creator economy cannot be away from the models,” he said. “The creator should be saying, I’m going to embrace the models.” If this scales, a creator’s taste becomes a permanent, monetizable asset rather than something that gets scraped and absorbed with no return.
The implications for retail are just as significant. Tiwari is blunt that e-commerce marketplaces are vulnerable. Those platforms have historically earned their place by handling curation, pricing, and fulfillment. Agentic AI, he argues, will do all three better. “The agent is going to do a much better job of selection than what the marketplaces are doing,” he said. “That value goes away. So I actually think the marketplaces will have a hard time.” Tiwari argues that independent brands that struggle to break through algorithmic gatekeeping could become far more discoverable. Consumers stop overpaying. Returns go down because the selection was right to begin with.
He also sees this moving well beyond the phone. Eighty percent of commerce still happens offline, and Tiwari envisions an agent that bridges both worlds. A consumer walking down Fifth Avenue hears through a wearable that the jeans they searched for two months ago are on aisle four of a store three blocks away, at the lowest price in six months. “The agent will tell you on the headphone immediately,” he said. “In less than five years, we will actually be doing this.”
On privacy, his answer is structural rather than just reassuring. Glance discloses its commission on every purchase because a model that hides its financial incentives will surface worse recommendations over time. Transparency isn’t a values statement here, it’s a product requirement. “The only way to avoid AI doing freaky things for you,” he said, “is to essentially create this transparency.”
For anyone still figuring out where they stand on AI, he didn’t leave much room for hesitation. “If you are a great runner, while I’m giving everybody else a car, no matter how fast you run, you’re never going to compete,” Tiwari said. “Looking at AI as an enemy is probably what’s impacting people.”
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Whether consumers embrace that vision remains to be seen. But Tiwari is betting that the future of shopping won’t be built around marketplaces or search bars. It will be built around agents that know what you want before you do.
Naveen Tiwari appeared on The AI Download with Shira Lazar. The episode was sponsored by InMobi and Glance.
