Truecaller Acquires Indian Payments App Chillr, Launches Truecaller 2.0

Truecaller has acquired Indian payments app Chillr to strengthen its payments business in the country. With this acquisition, Truecaller is looking to roll out Truecaller 2.0, wherein it will offer credit and other financial services to Indian users in the coming months.

Post acquisition, the founders of Chillr, Sony Joy, Anoop Sankar, Mohamed Galib and Lishoy Bhaskaran and the rest of the organization will be joining Truecaller, and Sony Joy will be the Vice President of Truecaller. The Stockholm-headquartered company will also double its team size in India.

Just in April 2017, Chillr made headlines when HDFC Bank launched the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) on it’s peer-to-peer payments app. Chillr has been running on IMPS with 33 banks and was expecting to see 10 Mn active transacting users as of December 2017.

The startup raised a Series A round of funding with $7 Mn from Blume Ventures, Unicorn Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others in December 2015.

“After spending time with the founders and the Truecaller team, we have realized that we share a lot of synergies; values; culture; and a sharp focus on user experience. Our roadmap on payments and financial services which when combined with the scale and resources of Truecaller, can create amazing experiences and solve genuine problems at an accelerated pace,” says Sony Joy, Co-founder, Chillr.

Truecaller provides a suite of unique services such as a dialer that offers caller ID, spam detection, messaging and more. The company’s mission is to build trust everywhere by making communication safe and efficient.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, the company was founded in 2009 by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Atomico and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.

Truecaller has a user base of 150 million users in India. It also has 300 partners in the country, where it will leverage its payments feature.  Last year in March, Truecaller had announced its foray into the digital payments segment, incorporating UPI-based transfers in its app.

“Since launching Truecaller Pay in 2017, we’ve seen an increasing number of use cases to make the lives of our users in India easier. By acquiring Chillr, we are reaffirming our commitment to mobile payments and strengthening our plans to increase its adoption amongst our user base. We will, together, have a far bigger impact in this space through the foundation of the team’s expertise and a strong user base that trust our platform and use it on a daily basis.” says Truecaller Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Nami Zarringhalam.

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