Nami Zarringhalam (left) and Alan Mamedi (right), the cofounders at the Truecaller. Bengaluru. September 2024.
Image: Nishant Ratnakar
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:
Business outlook: ‘We see Truecaller as a global company’
Mamedi: I do believe that our business globally will continue to grow. If you look at our user base, it’s actually growing faster outside of India than it is in India and that is because we see an extremely strong growth in Latin America, and parts of Southeast Asia. At the same time, India is a fantastic growing economy. In a couple of years, it’s probably going to be the largest economy in the world. And, of course, India will always be a very important part of our business. But we do see Truecaller as a global company and we want to continue to invest in growing in some of those regions.
Industry edge: ‘The fraud sector requires urgent focus’
Zarringhalam: We have had many competitors, and we still have many competitors. I think what has been different about Truecaller is that we don’t need to measure ourselves compared to anything else. We try to do the best that we can do with what we know we’re able to do and I think that comes through in the product because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to solve your problem in communications and then get out of the way. And I think that that is where we kind of created that category and inspired many others, which we’re very happy about.
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.
TrueGPT pilot: ‘Seeing high level of user engagement’
Zarringhalam: There’s been a lot of new technologies that have evolved and had an impact on our business and working with these large language models and trying to deploy them to our consumers and create value for the consumer is really what we’re looking at. And then you need to do that in a cost-efficient manner and also in a way that you know creates value for the end user. But as we roll these things out, we’re going to learn in the process, and we’ll be diligent about making sure that it’s done in a safe manner and things like biases and other things are taken care of. We’re not in a rush and we’re also fully open to partnering in these situations because what really matters to us is solving the customers’ needs and where we know that we have a solution and that’s when we will deploy it.
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.
Learnings from Truecaller Pay: ‘Have the capability to play a much bigger role in this domain’
Zarringhalam: Our conviction around the payment space was that, before any transaction, there’s always communication, whether you’re speaking to the store clerk or you’re sending money to your kids or buying something online… You’ve communicated, there’s been an interaction. And in that interaction, how can you make sure that it’s safe? At the time, that’s many years ago, but cash on delivery was still the most used method for paying when you were buying things online. So, that was kind of the genesis of it. And while we ended up shutting down the Truecaller Pay initiative, I think that ambition still resides within the company. We know that we have solutions for a lot of these things, whether it’s to solve for fraud, or whether it’s to create more efficiency, and I think our capability in that domain is still wide open.
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.
Data privacy concerns: ‘It’s hard to change a misconception’
Mamedi: If you compare Truecaller to most other companies, I would challenge any company, we’re actually the friendliest consumer product there is and the reason Truecaller exists is because it wants to protect consumers and so that means that all the practices that we do internally has to apply as well with the same sort of principle. And we have data minimisation policies that… We actually delete data after a certain period of time, and we’ve always said that everything we do, we should be able to stand in front of our camera and openly talk about it without feeling awkward.
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.
Dalal Street: ‘The Indian stock market is extremely hot’
Mamedi: We’re listed in Sweden, but we’ll see if we ever get to list in India. There are certain regulations around that. For example, you have to be listed in your current market for more than three years, then you can double list in India. We’ll see in the future what happens. The Indian stock market is extremely hot. India is such an important market for us. Most of our users are here.
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.
Being outsiders: ‘It creates hunger and resilience to reach the top’
Mamedi: As an immigrant, back in the days, you were also always an underdog because you looked different than the rest and, in some way, it creates this mentality that you want to prove everyone that you’re better and you feel that you need to work much harder to sort of reach there. It creates a very, very strong resilience to actually go the extra mile, creating a lot of hunger and drive to sort of reach the top. At the same time, I think it has also made me very humble because it makes me really appreciate the things and not take anything for granted.
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.
Watch the full interview on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=/Myr9FkxebAk