Collaborative phone directory Truecaller raises $60M

Truecaller has now raised a total of $80.5 million in funding

Remember when caller ID was a big deal back in the 90s? It was a huge deal to actually know who was calling before you picked up the phone. Try explaining that to kids who have never even heard of a landline phone!

What this has done, though, it created anxiety when a number shows up that I don't recognize. But even that may become a thing of the past thanks to verified mobile phone community app Truecaller.

The company has revealed that it has raised another $60 million in funding, from Atomico, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

This the second time this year that Truecaller has gotten new funding: it raised $18.8 million in Series B funding in February. Prior to that, it has previously raised a $1.3 million Series A round from Open Ocean in September of 2012. This latest round now brings its total amount raised to $80.5 million.

Founded in 2009, Truecaller is a Stockholm-based service that allows its user to block spam calls to their mobile phones and help identify unknown phone numbers. It is a crowd sourced phone books, which means that users will always know who is calling them, whether it is a person or business, and other community members filter out spammers/telemarketers.

Here's how it works: User can searching for any number or name that is on Truecaller. They can find businesses, financial institutions, or friends in the community. Truecaller users will then be notified when someone requests their number, and have the option to approve, or deny, any request that comes through.

When someone tries to get in touch, Truecaller tells the receiver who is trying to get in touch with them, even if the number is landline, mobile or pre-paid. The user's contact list can be updated with friends' profile pictures and status updates by choosing to source information from popular sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Truecaller also gives its users access to a list of top spammers, allowing them to quickly block calls from those numbers.

Yelp API data is integrated into the Truecaller app, which will allow its users to identify millions of reviewed businesses globally, and also view their Yelp rating. The company had also previously forged a partnership with Twitter that allowed users to tweet and follow other users directly through the Truecaller app, which currently has at least 45 million users. 

"In the past year, we have reached higher, typed faster, coded stronger, and welcomed 30 smiling new full time employees to the big Truecaller family," the company wrote in the blog post. "But we are reminded that only a few years ago, Truecaller was just a spark of an idea in the minds of two engineers that believed anything could happen if they ‘gave it their all.’"

In addition to the new funding, it was also announced that Truecaller has some new members on its board of directors; John Doerr from KPCB, Mattias Ljungman, Jerry Murdock, and Niklas Zennström, who is founder of Atomico and Skype, and who is joining Truecaller as a special adviser.