InMobi, a Bangalore headquartered mobile advertising network founded by Naveen Tewari has raised $8 million in a Series B round of funding from existing investors Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to fund the growth of its recently launched operations in the US, a launch in Japan and its existing operations in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa.

KPCB and Sherpalo Ventures had previously put in $7.1 million in 2008, and the Mumbai Angels had put in $500,000 in 2007. Recently, InMobi had announced a developer program wherein developers would get to keep 100% of the revenue share on mobile advertising on iPhone, iPad and Android, up to $2 million aggregate. (ED: they’re calling it a $2M fund, but it’s just a waiver of revenue share until a limit)

Serving 16.9 billion advertising impressions a month, across 108 countries, InMobi is cleverly positioning itself as the worlds largest “independent” advertising network: AdMob, previously the largest, was acquired by Google last year. It’s not unimaginable that InMobi sees itself as next-in-line, and it certainly is making an attractive pitch: it is pitching itself as an alternative to Google and Apple (iAds), entering markets like the US and Japan markets, and pushing to increase the number of impressions served on its network through the fund.

InMobi claims to have succeeded in pushing up ad impressions from 7.5 billion to 16.9 billion in just five months. Remember that Google had snapped up AdMob when Apple had a competing bid. In 2007, InMobi had started operations as a local mobile search service (hence the khoj in the name, which means search) but then moved onto mobile advertising.

Related:
- InMobi’s Most Important Move Yet: Launches In US
- Google To Buy AdMob For $750M; The Display Play; In India
- 149 Million Data Enabled Connections In India, As Of End 2009