The firm is headquartered in Stockholm, but the majority of its employees are Indian. India accounts for over a third of these downloads, and its database has a staggering 5.7 billion unique phone identities. According to Crunchbase, the firm raised a total of $98.6 million over eight rounds of funding, with Zenith Venture Capital, Atomico, and Sequoia Capital India being among the lead investors.Īs of March 2021, the app has been downloaded over 581 million times, the website claims. “The app began when our co-founders were just students who wanted to create a service that would easily identify incoming calls from unknown numbers,” Truecaller’s website says, adding that it is “the go-to app for caller ID and spam blocking.” On October 8, 2021, the company listed its initial public offering on Nasdaq Stockholm. Mamedi is of Kurdish descent and was born in a refugee camp in northern Sweden, while Zarringhalam moved to Sweden from Tehran at the age of three both are Swedish citizens now.

Truecaller was developed by True Software Scandinavia, a Swedish company founded in 2009 by Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi. Neither Truecaller nor Google had ever sought my consent to use or display my private number.

I was stunned, as I had never used Truecaller on this number or downloaded the app on the device I was using. They sent me another screenshot of a notification sent by Truecaller, which stated that my number was registered on WhatsApp. I even know that this number is registered on WhatsApp, the journalist from Lahore giggled. Humein toh yeh bhi pata hai ki aapka yeh number WhatsApp par registered hai” - I recognized you. The journalist told me that they had recently installed the Truecaller app from the Google Play Store on an Android phone.

The notification had my name, my former employer’s name, my designation at my former company, the state I was based in, and the name of my mobile operator. When asked how they identified me, they sent a screenshot of a notification received from the Truecaller app on their phone. Surprisingly, they greeted me by my name when they received the call. In October 2021, I called a journalist based in Pakistan, who did not know me.

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