Taiwan’s Whoscall beefs up junk call blocking app by acquiring rival

Gogolook, the Taiwan-based firm behind caller ID app Whoscall, announced today it has acquired StudioKUMA, a Hong Kong based startup that created an app that also blocks junk calls. The size of the acquisition hasn’t been disclosed, but Gogolook described the deal to Tech in Asia as an acquihire, and said it intends to invest HK$10 million (about US$1.2 million) in Hong Kong operations, including R&D and product.

StudioKuma has released several apps, including one that tracks bus routes around Hong Kong. But Gogolook is buying the company for StudioKuma Call Filter, an app that automatically blocks telemarketing calls by drawing from HKJunkcall.com, a crowdsourced database of phone numbers. This mirrors the functionality of Whoscall, which draws from its own user-generated database of phone numbers to identify callers.

StudioKuma founder Stark Wong will join Gogolook as technical consultant, while Gogolook will invest resources in improving StudioKuma’s call blocking app, which will remain accessible. Gogolook claims that the acquisition will effectively increase its daily active user count in Hong Kong from 1 million to 2 million.

Gogolook was officially founded in April 2012 by Jeff Kuo, Reiny Song, Jackie Cheng, and Peter Su. After Whoscall gained traction in East Asia and the Middle East, Naver, parent of popular messaging app Line, acquired the company in 2013 for a reported US$17 million. Edgar Chiu, who was COO of Gogolook at the time of its purchase, assumed the role of general manager of Camp Mobile Taiwan, a Naver branch that develops and releases global-facing mobile apps (some of which carry the Line brand), while the other founders continued to oversee Whoscall.

According to Ronald Yu, business director at Gogolook, the company has operated more-or-less independently from Naver in the year following its acquisition. While Naver doesn’t interfere with product development or business strategy, it provides Gogolook with the resources to support Whoscall when necessary. Yu singles out pre-install partnerships with Samsung and LG as one initiative that the Korean internet giant helped kickstart.

Whoscall remains free-to-use and Yu says that Naver hasn’t pressured Gogolook to monetize the app. But the team will experiment with revenue models by offering detailed, verified IDs to banks and other telemarketing firms in exchange for a fee. By increasing transparency regarding who is calling and for what purpose, Whoscall might help these companies drive pickup rates.

Whoscall currently has 20 million users worldwide, and over 700 million entries in its database. Yu says that Gogolook will push the app aggressively in Southeast Asia this year.

(An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Chiu as a co-founder of Gogolook)