The Swedish startup’s biggest market is India. In the future Truecaller even plans to roll out features so that small businesses in India can engage with end consumers. For now, here are the newly announced features to appease its biggest consumer base:
The India-only announcementsThe Airtel partnership - Truecaller call identification now available on feature phones on Airtel.
Alan Mamedi, CEO-cofounder of Truecaller said when asked why Airtel: “Airtel has been approaching us for many other projects and this rang true to us as a way to deliver what our users want from us. We would hopefully try to engage in more ventures if it fulfills our users’ expectations of Truecaller. For now we will be focusing on making the partnership with Airtel work.”
Partnership with ICICI Bank – Truecaller enters the payment wallet segment with Truecaller Pay, a mobile payment service in partnership with India’s largest private sector bank ICICI Bank to send and receive payments.
India and for the rest of the worldLaunch of Truecaller (version) 8 – Truecaller will allow SMS filtering; also introduced was Flash Messages for users in a rush as a way to send an emoticon, location coordinates or a basic template message.
TrueSDK is now platform agnostic – The software development kit will now be available for iOS and web in addition to Android OS.
Google video calling app integrated with Truecaller - Truecaller and Google Duo, Alphabet Inc’s mobile video chat app, is forming a partnership. Here on, Duo will be integrated within the Truecaller app.
Truecaller integration with Google Duo will be available in the coming months for Android and iOS as a permission-based service, where users will be able to opt-in and out at any time.
Duo was launched in August 2016 and India is one of its top two markets (US is the other one), which isn’t to say it caught the hearts of Indians; one possible reason would be India’s bandwidth constraints. This strategic partnership should push more Indians to look outside Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp when they need to use video calling.
Amit Fulay, head of Duo at Google said, “With this Truecaller integration, we’re able to bring a better video calling experience to millions of new users.”
Truecaller is the 3rd most downloaded and popular app in India (behind WhatsApp and Facebook). It has 250 million users globally, more than half of them are in India.
The last time Truecaller raised funds was in 2014. Alan said, “We haven’t had a reason to raise money beyond that. Our revenues are growing MoM and we hope to be profitable by end of this year (2017)."
While none of the partnerships announced today are monetized, Alan says that India contributes a healthy portion to its revenues.
So we had to ask Alan,
“Where would Truecaller be without India?”
He answered very honestly, “I don’t know”. Living in Sweden, amid multiple VCs saying “No” to their startup, Alan and Nami Zarringhalam, the chief strategy officer and other cofounder of Truecaller didn’t know that their true market was in India. Until Sequoia India’s Mohit and Shailesh convinced Alan and Nami to take a look at how Indians had embraced Truecaller.
“Sequoia is one of the best VCs in the world. When you’re on social media you read and see things. But you come down here, you interact with your users – person to person, and the reality is so different. We want to continue to add value to our user base in India. That is our priority.”
And why not. It’s a strategy that has paid off well for them so far.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
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