Kenya’s largest market for Truecaller app in sub-Saharan Africa

Husain Misherghi, Vice President of Growth and Partnerships Middle East and Africa at Truecaller.

Kenya is truecallers largest market in Sub Saharan Africa after it grew by 570 percent in 2014 to hit over 5 million Kenyan Subscribers.

Egypt currently has the largest number of Truecaller users in Africa standing at 16 million, even as the app records a total of 200 million users globally. In places like Jordan and Lebanon however 90% of the population uses the Truecaller and in Sub Saharan Africa there are over 10 million users on Truecaller, making it one of the most used applications globally.

Speaking to CIO East Africa, Husain Misherghi, Vice President of Growth and Partnerships Middle East and Africa at Truecaller, he explained that Truecaller is a Swedish company started back in 2009 and head quartered in Stockholm. “Truecaller finds contact details globally given name or telephone number, and has an integrated caller ID service to achieve call-blocking functionality and social media integration to keep the phonebook up-to-date with pictures and birthdays,” he added.

The name Truecaller comes from the app being able to show the True name of the Caller. The client is available for free on Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, Series 40, Symbian s60, Firefox OS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

As of September 2012 Truecaller had five million users performing 120 million searches of the telephone number database every month. As of 22 January 2013 Truecaller reached 10 million users.As of November 2015 Truecaller had reached 200 million users world wide.

In terms of revenue Mr. Misherghi said that they were not generating any revenue yet since Truecaller has received over $80 million in funding to date from prominent investors including Atomico, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. The same year also announced a partnership with Yelp to use Yelp’s API data to help identify business numbers when they call a smartphone.

True Caller as an app is currently present in 229 countries and with the rapid growth the app is available in over 40 languages globally. The app is also localized to fit in the different Geographic region they have a presence in.

In August 2015, Truecaller launched its SMS App called Truemessenger . Truemessenger helps the users in identifying the sender of an SMS and keeps users’ inboxes clean by putting spam messages in a separate folder.

Mr. Misherghi also added that with the strong recent growth users are relying more and more on Truecaller on a daily basis. Truecaller now sees over 3 billion searches per month showing a 50% growth.

Last month, the app also launched the company’s first ever free phonebook app Truecaller and dial pad replacement app Truedialer which will now come equipped with new option that will let users tag a contact based on a broad range of categories such as transportation banking and finance making it even easier to ID your cab driver or your bank.