Forget Internet.org, this startup has a net neutral way to make surfing cheaper

My mum is a prepaid smartphone user. A year ago, I introduced her to the joys of instant messaging on WhatsApp, reading Tech in Asia on her little device, and Skyping. That’s just about all she does with her phone – well, besides making and receiving calls. Yet, her monthly phone expenses have tripled since the pre-smartphone days. And the culprit? Data charges.

Gigato, a new app launched today, is offering India’s millions of prepaid smartphone users (like my mom) respite from hefty data charges. How? It’s a marketing platform for apps that rewards users with data.

This is how it works: you sign up on Gigato with your phone number, operator, and circle. (For the purposes of telephone service licensing, regulators have divided India into over 20 telecom circles or service areas.) Gigato will auto-detect the apps you have on your smartphone and show you a list of promotions from those apps. For example, on my phone, I got a “buy-one-get-one-free” kind of offer for using WhatsApp – “Use 25MB on WhatsApp, earn 25MB,” it said.

Next is a discovery stream on the Gigato app. There you will see a host of promotions from its partner apps. For example, I saw furniture etailer Pepperfy offer “use 10MB, earn 12MB.” There was music streaming app Saavn with “use 30MB, earn 40MB,” and so on.

Once you pick an offer, Gigato will track your data usage on that app. As soon as you hit the mark set in the offer, you will get a message from your operator saying however-much reward data has been credited to your account.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But it certainly wasn’t simple for the Gigato team to create.

Room for misunderstanding

Gigato is the first product built by Mavin, a California and Gurgaon-based startup. India is the first market where it has launched.

Technologists Shailesh Nalawadi and Raina Kumra, who founded Gigato, both studied and worked in the US.

Nalawadi worked with Google’s product team, which launched Google Maps, Google Glass, and Gmail. Kumra was co-director of innovation for The BBG, a federal agency that oversees all US civilian international media. A member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, she has degrees from Boston University, New York University, and Harvard University.

“Can we build a sustainable business platform which would also make the internet accessible to more people?” That was the idea that spurred Nalawadi and Kumra to start Mavin. They worked on it for about two years before coming up with Gigato. But they couldn’t have picked a more difficult time to launch it.

Earn data on Gigato, use it anywhere

Why pay for data?