Stockholm-headquartered Truecaller was co-founded by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam amidst the unfolding chaos of the global financial crisis. The college friends wanted to tackle the problem of pesky calls. In the first week of its launch, the leading global caller ID and call blocking app was downloaded by 10,000 users. “That’s when we decided to just go all in on it," the duo recalls. “We did the things we were passionate about but we didn’t foresee it becoming this big."
Since its launch fifteen years ago, Truecaller has expanded its international footprint. It started its India operations after Sequoia India invested in the company. Over the years, the regulatory environment has tightened and the competition has intensified.
“What we"re trying to do is, we"re trying to solve people"s problem in communications, and then get out of the way, and that is where we kind of created that category and we’re happy that we inspired many others," Zarringhalam says.
In a detailed interview on Forbes India Pathbreakers, Mamedi, CEO, and Zarringhalam, CSO, discuss the impact of the evolving industry trends on Truecaller’s business strategies and future growth plans. Edited excerpts:
There have been ambitions to curb spam calls and different initiatives have had that different amount of success. But what is really urgent right now is the fraud sector. And I think that"s where we have since the past three to five years invested tremendously. We"ve even acquired companies to make sure that we do the best we can to serve our user base and protect them from fraudsters. We"re collaborating with TRAI, the other regulators in other spaces, including in the financial sector… We"re trying to work with everyone to make sure that we do our part to curb the problem of fraudsters.
Mamedi: We started to test it out in Nigeria. And with the strength that we have, we have been able to deploy new technology to a lot of users, just making it easier, accessible… It has been an interesting thing for us to sort of evaluate.
Zarringhalam: The engagement level of our users was really high on TrueGPT. We also found out that there were specific use cases where it was more useful to the customers. For instance, to just hint at it, a lot of people have very common questions about health and this is where you want to be able to actually meaningfully help someone when they have health concerns. But you also don"t want to lead them in the wrong direction, and so we take our responsibility and we want to make sure that we deploy something at scale that actually solves the issues for the consumer in a meaningful way. So, I think that"s how we"re looking at it and we"ll continue to innovate in this area.
So, in the coming year or years, there"s going to be more and more things that we do to integrate into those areas and still provide value without necessarily being the delivery mechanism of utilising, for instance, UPI. I mean UPI is a phenomenal story in itself. The financial sector has its own regulations and constraints. And I think that parties like Truecaller actually have a lot of value to create in terms of efficiency and I think that we have a role to play that is much bigger than we"re currently playing and hopefully some of these things will start to show going forward.
So, I would say that, Truecaller is always on the consumer’s side and we always collect, if we collect, the information, then we always ask the user first. And we only collect the information that we know will bring value back to you as a consumer. So that"s been our stance basically since we started the company. And I think for most people who joined Truecaller, they actually get surprised how much we care about these things. So, I would actually challenge that.
When we started the company, we built crowdsourcing functionality. So, this is in 2009-2010, where Truecaller would ask you when you installed it that hey, would you like to share your phone book in order to make the service better? In 2013, we stopped that way of collecting information, so we haven"t done it for 11 years now. It"s hard to change a misconception, it always is.
And then of course, when I would say that, you would say, but how come my information is there? So, our users in India, they make and receive over 4 billion calls every single day. So, every time you receive a call, Truecaller asks you who was this, is this correct? Then you can actually correct the information and then our machine learning models become better at predicting what the community has said.
So, there is a certain misconception. But it"s quite well known that most large and successful tech companies collect a lot of information. So, people just assume that just because Truecaller is a very successful and large company, we also do that, but we don"t. We all know what companies like Google and Facebook do and we"ve always had this stance that we want to be an independent company that does things our way which is protecting our consumers.
So, in hindsight, it would have made sense for us to list in India back in 2021. But there weren’t that many tech companies in India that were listed. It wasn"t until the beginning of 2022, that"s when you started seeing more and more Indian tech companies going public. But, in 2020, when we started to evaluate the different markets—we looked at India, we looked at the US, we looked at London, Sweden—India had almost zero tech companies on the public stock market. So, the world has changed in a very short period of time.
Zarringhalam: In our households we grew up with very strong mothers. They were hard working and pushing us forward all the time… Whether it"s about getting education or whether it"s about which friends we hang out with. And at the time you don"t appreciate it. It"s not a thankful job to be that parent, but it was something that really made a dent in our lives. We both had strong women and strong mothers in our lives.
First Published: Oct 16, 2024, 13:54
Subscribe Now