Truecaller secures $18.8M led by Sequoia Capital, announces integration with Yelp

Truecaller, a collaborative mobile phone directory app developed by Swedish startup True Software Scandinavia AB, has raised $18.8 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital, the company said in a blog post.

The firm has also announced a partnership with US-based business directory and review site Yelp.com to help Truecaller users identify local, national and international businesses and also view their Yelp rating.

"Today marks a very important day for the Truecaller team. We officially announce an investment of $18.8M in funding led by Sequoia Capital," read the blog post. "...It has been four years since we started this journey.

The word 'Truecaller' been spoken about in over 32 languages on Twitter trends, text messages, post-it notes, the dinner table, praised by celebrities, and has journeyed across the seven seas to smartphones near and far."

The Yelp integration takes Truecaller's own search engine to find people and identify numbers, and combines it with Yelp's crowdsourced business ratings to create one place for genuine and accurate information to use without leaving the Truecaller app.

Last year, Truecaller had partnered with Bangalore-based Innoz Technologies, which offers a search service for basic mobile phones with no internet access, to enable users to search for people by texting their phone numbers.

Founded in 2009, Truecaller is a collaborative global phone directory. The app is currently available on the web, as well as on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms. The company has 22 million users in India and claims to be adding around 5 lakh users on a weekly basis. The firm recently entered into a partnership with Twitter, wherein users will be able to find people active on the micro-blogging site just by entering their phone numbers in the app. Using this app, people will also be able to follow Twitter users and tweet.

However, they will not be able to post comments on tweets or see full timelines as of now.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)