Meet the guy who holds the planet’s two billion mobile phone numbers

Alan Mamedi, cofounder and CEO of Truecaller. Photo credit: Truecaller.com

It is the third most downloaded app in India after Facebook and WhatsApp. It has consistently been in the top 10 apps in India for months altogether with over 120 million downloads. That is Truecaller, which has over 2 billion phone numbers of the planet’s smartphone population in its servers located in Sweden. Yet, the company has just 80 employees, who run its entire worldwide infrastructure of over 200 million users.

On a nice sunny morning in Delhi, Truecaller’s co-founder and CEO Alan Mamedi, talks to Tech in Asia about building the startup, which was rejected by about 20 investors before it got funded by Sequoia Capital India in 2013.

A migrant’s story

Alan’s mother, hails from Kurdistan. And his father was an Iranian political leader who migrated in 1984 to Sweden. This was after the Iranian revolution shook the country in 1979. His father was not from the pro-revolution (Ayatollah Khomeini) regime, so he had little choice but to leave. The family packed their bags and moved to a new country of which they didn’t even know the language.

Growing up in Sweden, Alan lived a life away from the political turmoil of Iran, which he never visited. He joined the Stockholm based Royal Institute of Technology. “My passion was technology and that’s why I took computer science as a major so that someday I could start a technology company,”

After graduating, Alan took up a job as a developer at BabyBjorn – a company which sold baby cradles and carriers. He also teamed up with his college batchmate Nami Zarringhalam to build Sweden’s first search engine for furniture. Alan was fed up of seeing the same kind of furniture – bought from Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant – in most homes and offices in the country. But even after registering over 2,500 stores, the search engine didn’t go anywhere as the revenue was bleak.

Scenes of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in Shahyad Square (now called Azadi Square) in Tehran. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Meanwhile Alan changed employers. After doing a job about two years in a row, often employees start cribbing about employers. So did Alan.

That’s when he and his collegemate Nami thought of creating an employer review website – just like Glassdoor (which didn’t exist back then) – where employees could vent out feelings about their employers.

Often reviews on their website – called Jobbigt.se, which meant ‘Troublesome’ in Swedish – would come right on top of the search results when a person looked up an employer on the internet.

Genesis of Truecaller

Alan soon started receiving a lot of calls from other countries where employers would ask him to remove a particular bad review on Jobbigt.se. He would profusely deny. He found it frustrating when he would not recognize a particular name or number and wanted a universal caller ID – so that he could try and screen calls from an unknown number – which he didn’t wish to answer.

That was the genesis of Truecaller. Alan and Nami, developed the software in 2009 for their own use. They were using Nokia N95 and HTC phones then.

They also put a link on XDA forum in 2009. The software was an instant hit. In a week, they received 10,000 downloads of the software. Encouraged by the response, they sold Jobbigt.se for US$20,000. They used the money to buy servers and test devices for Truecaller.

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