Truecaller raises $60 million from Atomico, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital


    You have to imagine Champagne bottles were popping in Stockholm last night as Truecaller announced it has raised a massive $60 million Series C from Niklas Zennström’s Atomico, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. The company provides something like a crowdsourced yellow pages – by installing their app on your phone they add all your contacts into their database, but give you nice caller ID and let you do reverse number lookups for those missed calls and pay for searching for phone numbers by name. This funding was reportedly raised at a $300 million valuation.

    It’s not so much that these investors are just buying into a database, Truecaller has managed to hit a massive userbase as well with over 200,000 new users joining daily, as well as good traction in tougher-to-reach markets like India, the Middle East, Brazil, and Africa. In those rapidly connecting regions the mess of pre-paid phones and changing numbers makes it impossible to find out who-is-who without a crowdsourced directory.

    Truecaller’s growth isn’t news on this blog – we’ve been writing about milestones since their launch. But the company seems to still be rocketing up – they’ve roughly doubled from 800 million searches six months ago to 1.5 billion searches a month today.

    “Truecaller is solving a major pain point among smartphone owners who are looking for a better way to manage their contacts and always have the right information they need to stay connected,” said Niklas Zennström of Atomico. “It is great to see a team from Sweden that’s re-thinking how we communicate and scaling their technology globally. We look forward to working with the team to help them reach the next 100 million users,” continued Zennström in a statement.

    Lately Truecaller has made some big name partnerships with Yelp and Twitter, although I’m curious how their Twitter partnership is going as the company no longer allows users to sign in through Twitter credentials.

    To date, Truecaller has raised $80 million after the $18.8 million bump led by Sequoia Capital in February of this year.