Our Latest Investment: Phone Warrior

The technology world has become a little bit flatter over the last ten years; the US monopoly on producing technology startups with impact outcomes has been broken. We have all seen impact product companies coming out of Europe, Israel, and China over the past decade.

These startups are leveraging new platforms and customer behaviors that were non-existent ten years ago, including platforms such as app stores, SaaS app marketplaces, smartphones, tablets, content marketing channels, social media, and embedded payment options; and new user behaviors such as self-service on-boarding, bottoms-up technology adoption in SMBs/enterprises, use of open source technologies, and search as a primary way to find new applications/technologies.

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. There are already several examples of such companies, including Browserstack, Freshdesk, Helpshift, InMobi, Kayako, Nimbuzz, Simplify360, Webengage, Wingify and Zoho.

Investing with this theme, we are excited to partner with Chandan and Vaibhav at 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 (incubated at 91Springboard) 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.

There is much more to come that leverages this core platform. We look forward to exciting times ahead with the Phone Warrior team.

Post Authors: @dkhare and @anshoo