Lightspeed Venture invests in mobile spam control app Phone Warrior

New Delhi-based startup Phone Warrior Pvt Ltd that has developed a mobile spam control app by the same name has raised seed funding from venture capital fund Lightspeed Venture Partners. While the exact amount invested is not disclosed, a Techcrunch report stated that it is around $550,000. The funds will be used for marketing, in order to increase the app's user base to 10 million from 1 million currently, the report quoted Phone Warrior's founder Chandan Gupta as saying.

Phone Warrior is a mobile app (available on Android, Symbian 60 and Blackberry platforms) that blocks all spam calls as well as SMS. It provides details like caller name, location and any other spammer information every time a user receives/makes a call to an unknown number. It claims to have a database of over 100 million phone numbers globally. Some of its features include free caller Id and caller info details (Indian users can see caller info without internet also), integrated text & call blocker, real-time spammer lookups for unknown numbers, etc.

The app is also available in many other languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Chinese and Russian. Though the app is free for all platforms, a premium version of the app is also available for annual subscription of $3 on BlackBerry phones.

"We are excited to partner with Chandan and Vaibhav at Phone Warrior to take mobile communications to the next level. What Wikipedia did to encyclopaedias and Waze did to radio road traffic reports and paper maps, Phone Warrior is doing to plain old phone calls and messaging," read the official blog announcement. Phone Warrior is also an incubatee company of 91springboard, a Delhi-based startup incubator.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)