Former OnMobile CEO Arvind Rao back as an entrepreneur

After launching mobile tariff and network service BilllBachao, Rao plans to foray into e-commerce

After a stint at Reliance Jio Infocomm, Arvind Rao, co-founder and former chief executive officer and managing director of Bengaluru-based mobile value-added services player OnMobile, is back as an entrepreneur.

Rao, who was head of innovations at the Mukesh Ambani-controlled telecom service provider, has already launched a mobile tariff comparison and recommendation service called BillBachao, and plans to launch two more business ventures, including one in e-commerce, during the course of the year. “Of course, I was missing entrepreneurship. While Jio was a very exciting project, I knew that I would have to go back to being an entrepreneur,” Rao told Business Standard.

Rao fulfilled this dream in December when he launched BillBachao along with Jonathan Bill, formerly a senior vice-president with Vodafone India looking after Innovation and business development.

Since then, the BillBachao app, available to Android and iPhone users, has seen around 100,000 downloads.

In little over a month of its launch, the company is in talks with a couple of global venture capitalists to raise Series ‘A’ funding, which could be in the range of $5-10 million.

The main objective of BillBachao, according to Rao, is to empower consumers to take better decisions and spend their money judiciously instead of ‘being at the mercy of merchants or suppliers’.

While the first application of BillBachao targets telecom, the company wants to launch applications for banking and insurance among others.

“We want to launch a series of services which will put the power back into the hands of the consumer. We are planning to cover several services over a period of time. This is the first one, which is for mobile phone users,” added Rao who is considered a veteran in the telecom and emerging technologies sectors.

According to the founders, BillBachao is unique in the sense that it provides recommendations on rate plans, service providers, and network density objectively because it is not dependant on telecom operators for commissions or incentives.

There are a couple of similar apps available in the market, but those also enable users to recharge their phones.

Rao said it took almost a year to prepare the database of 55,000-odd rate plans of various telecom companies in the country as well as the recommendation engine, software which the company has filed a patent application for.

The platform enables crowd-sourced signal strengths of various telecom service providers that is offered as an additional recommendation.  Rao said the overall opportunity in the mobile services market was around Rs 2,00,000 crore per annum, but the initial focus of the company was to expand its user base. “This is a huge market. There are many other things one can recommend in this space. Once we understand users’ requirements, we can also offer recommendations on which handsets or tablets to buy,” he added.

A BTech from IIT Bombay and Master of Science from the University of Wisconsin, Rao had a successful career in the private equity and venture capital business after his MBA in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

He also had a stint at McKinsey & Co, where he focussed on the electronics sector before co-founding OnMobile.