Lightspeed Venture Partners invest $550k in Phone Warrior to boost mobile communication

Phone Warrior is an application that blocks spam calls and text messages on the mobile and was founded in late 2012 by Chandan Gupta and Vaibhav Padlikar. We reviewed the app when it launched and tracked its growth over the next year as it grew to a global telephone directory of more than 100 million numbers (which has now tripled). In an announcement yesterday, Lightspeed Venture Partners has invested $550k in this New Delhi based startup.Phone Warrior has a user base of a million across the globe and the funding will be used to market the product further. Announcing the funding on their blog, Dev Khare and Anshoo Sharma explained their thesis behind the funding:

We believe it is now the right time for Indian product startups to step up to the global plate, especially in mobile applications, developer tools/enabling technologies, and SaaS for SMBs.

Investing with this theme, we are excited to partner with Phone Warrior to take mobile communications to the next level. What Wikipedia did to encylopedias and Waze did to radio road traffic reports and paper maps, namely disrupting existing businesses with community, real-time and mobile, Phone Warrior is doing to plain old phone calls and messaging. Phone Warrior’s user growth, retention and engagement in countries around the world over the past six months gives us confidence that they are well on their way to finding product-market fit.

Phone Warrior is building a globally-relevant cloud-based platform to crowd-source mobile phone numbers and turbo-charge the value of this data through big data techniques, graph search and machine learning. Through this platform, Phone Warrior powers an essential set of services that has grown rapidly over the past year and could get onto every mobile device in the world across all forms of communication including phone calls, text messaging and over-the-top IP-based messaging. Their product is currently visible on mobile devices through services such as caller-ID, spam blocking and call-blocking.

The company has a few global competitors like TrueCaller which are ahead in the race but this funding gives Phone Warrior fuel to push harder and gain more traction to move closer towards their vision.

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