Pune based startup
InTouchApp - an app that aims to make your phone contacts smarter, has raised their first round of funding from Blume Ventures. InTouchApp has generated good traction by solving contact management problems for smartphone users and manages over a billion contacts for millions of users around the globe. The app is available on all major smartphone platforms – iOS, Android, WindowsPhone and Blackberry – and is rated over 4.4 stars.
InTouchApp was founded by Sarang Lakare in 2012 in Pune. He returned to India after spending many years in the US, including a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and working with Siemens Healthcare for over 6 years. “I knew that the smartphone was going to be central to our lives and the ways phones were looking at address books, it wasn’t very different from the non-connected era of feature phones. I sensed an opportunity to change that and I still think there’s a long road ahead of us”, says Sarang. Today, InTouchApp has over 2.5 million downloads globally and manages over 1.3 billion contacts. He adds, “We bootstrapped the company until recently. With Blume Ventures, we found the right partner to help us scale InTouchApp to the next level.”
On this occasion, Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures says, “The Blume team has known and tracked Sarang and InTouch for a while now. We've personally been obsessed about finding or supporting a team that saw the problem that we do. And while Sarang had already built a robust product, the next phase is extremely exciting for us - where it moves from utility to a private social network in small organizations and teams. The ability to share and add relevant network seamlessly in a mobile centric era is what InTouch will solve. The hole left by LinkedIn is ours to fill."
So far, InTouchApp helped users solve contacts related problems such as backup, sync, etc. However, getting a contact from a near-one for daily or emergency use cases still requires much back-and-forth communication and is almost always a hassle. With InTouchApp, now one can share phone contacts with another person easily and securely. A simple search makes the shared contacts accessible to them - making the entire process hassle-free & seamless!
Sarang also shares the motivation behind this feature. “I was once travelling with friends. After a full day excursion, when we decided to call our cab driver to head back, I discovered my phone battery was dead. It would have been really handy then if I could access my contacts on my friend’s phone!”. He recounts a real-life success story, “a friend is in merchant navy and is inaccessible for months. Whenever his wife needs a contact from him, it would always be a hassle. With sharing, now she has instant access to the contacts she needs.”
