Phone directory app, Truecaller, which holds half of its 100 million users in India, is planning to expand its base in the country by setting up a research and development (R&D) centre and hiring more marketing personnel.
Truecaller was started in 2009 by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam, the Swedish company enables users to search for contact information (based on name, number or address), to identify incoming calls or block calls or to make personal contact suggestions on the basis of time and place. The company presently has 60 employees from nearly 40 nationalities in its head office in India. In an interview, Truecaller founder, Mamedi, told PTI, ”Among the 60 employees, four are Indians. Seventy per cent of the staff are programmers, two of them are women from India,” he said.
It is a free application, which displays the name of the person calling even if the name of the number is not saved in the receiver’s phone. Mamedi told PTI, ”India is a very unique market and when one starts growing in India, one can grow really fast. We have an office in Gurgaon. We will be adding more people in India next year for our marketing team”, said Mamedi. ”Right now we have one person in India. We are also planning R&D centre, probably in Bangalore or Pune.”he said. “Truecaller is installed in around 40 per cent of smartphones in India. The country has over an estimated 115 million smartphone subscribers, behind only China and the US,” he further added.
Trucaller app is pre-installed on most of the phones including Micromax in India. Mamedi and Zarringhalam were moved by the idea of this application, when they noticed that there wasn’t any single mobile app to trace calls. In conversation with PTI, Mamedi said,”We thought we need to solve this problem ourselves. We wanted to make people-search readily available to anyone. That was how Truecaller was born,” said Mamedi. ”For the people here in India, blocked and spam calls are a big issue. And Truecaller helps in identifying callers and even blocking unwanted ones,” he further added.
Truecaller has recently opened its office in Beijing. It also has plans to start offices in Dubai, Sao Paulo and in Kenya by 2015. Truecaller also has a sister app, Truedialer, which enables users to avail the detail of a person before making an outgoing call to it.
