Truecaller, a free global phone directory with presence in every country in the world, expects to add more than half of its user base from India.
The Stockholm-based company (whose services are used to identify unknown phone numbers or block spam calls) is aiming to more than quadruple its global subscriber base to 200 million by December.
“India is a top market and hence it’s a top priority…. We are scaling up this business globally, and we will focus a lot on the rapidly growing Indian market,” Truecaller Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Alan Mamedi told
“In India, two-third of the growth would be from the major cities. The growth would be on the back of increasing penetration of smartphones, rising number of smaller start-ups and increase in usage by telecom operators,” Mamedi said.
Increasing presence At present, one in every four smartphone user has Truecaller, and this is expected to further rise on the rising penetration of smartphones and feature phones. Of its present 45 million users, more than half or about 25 million are in India. Truecaller expects mobile phone users in Africa, Latin America and certain countries in Asia, including Indonesia, to add to the 200 million user target.
On Friday, it also received an $18.8 million new funding, led by Sequoia Capital India. Earlier, Truecaller has partnered with microblogging site Twitter in India, helping a user to instantly tweet back to a missed call. “We will see more of these kinds of partnerships and a lot of innovations in India,” Mamedi said.
Truecaller, started in 2009 by two students of at Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (Mamedi and co-Founder Nami Zarringhalam), provides the mobile application by the same name that displays name of caller, even if the number is not saved on the phone. The application can be downloaded free-of-cost.
“The application does not access any user’s phonebook, or any other data on the mobile phone. It’s a permission-based functionality,” Mamedi said, adding that Truecaller is a verified mobile phone community and it adds or updates its directory when a user provides information.