Meet the man whose Truecaller app identified 30 billion spam calls in India

Nami Zarringhalam is co-founder of Truecaller, one of the world's top caller-ID and spam blocking firms. He says the company plans to go public by 2022 and India would play a key role there

Despite work-from-home becoming the new normal due to the pandemic, Nami Zarringhalam, co-founder of Truecaller, walks everyday from his home to his office in Stockholm, Sweden, where the company is headquartered. Truecaller is one of the world’s largest caller-identification and spam blocking services firm. Though Zarringhalam has been able to spend more quality time with his family amid the pandemic, he misses travelling to India a lot.

“I miss both our teams and the insights that we get every time we go to India,” says Zarringhalam. “It is very close to our hearts and our second home.”

Indeed, Truecaller has over 250 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally. Over 185 million MAUs or around 75 per cent of the users are now based in India. Globally it has about 230 employees, out of which 130 are in India spread across Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. The firm also generates 70 per cent of the revenues from the country.

“We actually have more employees in India now than we have in Stockholm,” says Zarringhalam, an alumnus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

The company was founded in 2009 in Sweden by Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi. The app began when the co-founders were just students who wanted to create a service that would easily identify incoming calls from unknown numbers.

Last year, Truecaller blocked 29.7 billion spam calls in India.  Also, about 8.5 billion spam SMS (short message service) and scam messages were identified and blocked by the firm for the Indian users in the same period.

But many calls may not be spam. The firm has created a service around brands which alerts customers to pick up priority calls such as e-commerce deliveries. This service has got a lot of traction from the enterprises.

“You actually get to know that it is a (call) about Flipkart delivery,” he says.

The firm has also built the ‘Call Alerts’ feature which allows the users to know who’s calling even before their phone rings. This enables them to set the phone on silent, ignore it or move to a quieter place to speak.

Zarringhalam, says spamming activities went down during April and May. A lot of people or organizations that make spam calls or send unsolicited messages were not able to work from home due to the pandemic. 

However, these activities have increased again. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the coronavirus outbreak and are targeting citizens with Covid-19 related phishing and malware. People were being asked to donate money to certain UPI (unified payments interface) handles that were fake. Fraudsters have been posing as Covid related government funds to help people in this distress situation. 

“But when our users get such text messages, Truecaller actually marks them as spam and locks them for you automatically,” he says.

The users are also able to know, whom they are actually sending the money, before completing any such transaction. Zarringhalam says the company has teams that work with different machine learning and artificial intelligence models to improve the detection of spam.

Building such a unique communication platform has enabled the firm to come up with new layers of innovations in areas ranging from payments to financial services. Truecaller had piloted a credit system last year in the country. It plans to roll it out at scale steadily, with partners in the area, throughout this year. It is empowering small and medium businesses in tier 2 and tier 3 cities by offering digital loans within the app. The firm is also launching financial services such as wealth management and insurance and plans to scale them up in the next few years.

Zarringhalam says that every month, its users get a couple of billion text messages, for instance from banks. The firm’s technology can identify ‘action’ on those messages.

“We are trying to create a frictionless experience where you can actually pay the bill directly from that text message, as opposed to moving into a different app,” he says.

Regarding the privacy concerns, which often come up related to the firm's caller ID feature, and reports of data leaks on the dark web that surfaced last year, Zarringhalam says that the company is continuously making sure that it has the highest bank-grade security systems. He says the firm continuously enforces policies and processes to safeguard the Indian user data which has been stored in India, well ahead of the regulations. 

“Our data is encrypted,” says Zarringhalam. “What we've noticed is that they (hackers) compiled the data together from different sources, excluding Truecaller and branded it as the (company) database to ride on the brand.”

Truecaller said it would continue to expand its teams and create innovations suited for the Indian market. The 11-year-old firm has now started the process to go public by 2022, where India would play a key role.

“We would be introducing India as part of our story to a  lot of people around the world,” he says. “Like investors that may not be as familiar with the Indian market.”