Truecaller's India user base grows to 100 mn

App that identifies unknown numbers sees major growth in smaller towns

After increasing its user base during the past year from 35 million to 100 million, Truecaller, a Swedish app-based company that helps in identifying unknown numbers and blocks spam calls, is aiming to double its user base in India by next year. This week, the company crossed 100-million mark in India, where it has half its global users.

“By December (this year), our target is to have 150 million users. By the end of next year, we are expecting user base at 200 million,” Kari Krishnamurthy, vice-president of growth and partnerships, Asia & country manager for India, told Business Standard.

According to the company, the increasing adoption of social media platforms such as Whatsapp and Facebook is also paving the way for apps such as Truecaller to reach Tier-II and Tier-III cities. During the past quarter, Truecaller has been able to make a major inroads into Tier-II and Tier-III towns, which helped it to a great extent expanding the user base.

“The last quarter has been phenomenal for us and we have been able to enter Tier-II and Tier-III towns in a big way. Earlier, 85 per cent of our user base was from metropolitan cities and the remaining from smaller towns. Now, smaller town accounts for almost 35 per cent of our user base, which we want to take to 50 per cent over a period of time,” added Krishnamurthy.

Globally, the company aims to increase its user base to 300 million by the end of this year.

India is its biggest market and by the end of this year, it would constitute half its subscriber base. The other major markets for the company are West Asia and North Africa.

Truecaller has around two billion numbers in its global database.

In India, it identifies about 900 million calls and 120 million spam calls a month.

“A strong community-developed database of two billion names and numbers is the USP for the app,” the company said.

According to Krishnamurthy, the company is working out the ways to monetise its app and will take a decision on it by the end of the first quarter of next year. “We do not know as of now what the construct of it would be,” added Krishnamurthy. Earlier, the company used to have an advertisement-based revenue model. “We got rid of the advertisements as we wanted to give a great user experience to our subscribers,” said Krishnamurthy.

At present, the company generates revenues from premium subscription and is planning to get into partnerships to increase its user base. Currently, Truecaller has partnerships with Airtel, Tata Docomo, Gionee, Obi, Celkon, Micromax, Microsoft, and Cyanogen.  Truecaller is now working on a product called ‘Native Dialer’, which is a combination of Truecaller and Truedialer. The company has three apps including Truemessenger, which is the third major offering from the firm after Truecaller and Truedialer.  

According to industry insiders, the company is also planning to raise $100 million dollars in funding.  

In October last year, Truecaller had raised $60 million in a funding round led by Atomico Ventures, the start-up investment fund established by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, alongside Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers and its previous backer Sequoia Capital India.

It had earlier raised $18.8 million led by Sequoia in February 2014 and $1.3 million from Open Ocean Capital in September 2012.