Truecaller acquires Chillr

Sweden’s Truecaller started out life as a service that screen calls and messages to weed out spammers. In recent time the company has switched its focus to India, its largest market based on users, adding services that include payments to make it more useful. Now Truecaller is putting even more weight behind its India push after it announced its first acquisition, mobile payment service Chillr.

The vision is to go deeper into mobile payments and associated services to turn Truecaller into a utility that goes beyond just handling messages and calls, particularly payments — a space that WhatsApp is preparing to enter in India. Truecaller doesn’t have WhatsApp - like scale — few companies can match 200 million active users in India, but it did recently disclose that it has 100 million daily active users worldwide, while India is its largest country with 150 million registered users.

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith. Chillr, which offer payment services between over 50 banks, had raised $7.5 million from the likes of Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The development of the service in India has made it look from the outside that the company is splitting into two, a product localized for India and another for the rest of the world.

Zomato acquires delivery startup Runnr

Food technology startup Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd has acquired delivery start-up Runnr as part of a widely expected, all stock deal that would help the former significantly shore up its food delivery business, amid intense competition from rapidly growing rivals such as Swiggy.

The deal also hands out a lifeline to Runnr which has struggled to raise funds in the recent past. It has raised about $20-25 million since it started out in 2015 from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Runnr was a product of a merger between hyperlocal delivery start-up Roadrunnr and food-ordering start-up TinyOwl.

Goyal said Runnr was already fulfilling about 300,000 orders a month. He added that Runnr founder Mohit Kumar will remain chief executive and will continue to work on the strategic vision for the start-up with the rest of his team. He said the acquired firm will continue to be run independently by Kumar.

Prior to its buyout of Runnr, Zomato used to aggregate restaurants on its platform and works with third-party delivery partners such as Runnr and Grab to execute deliveries. In September 2015, Zomato had picked up a minority stake in Grab (Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd) to bolster its food delivery business.

Exotel acquires Voyce

Exotel, a Bangalore based virtual business telephone company, has acquired Voyce, a company which allows businesses to get real time customer feedback, to strengthen Exotel customer service offerings. Voyce claimed to work with over 20 enterprise hospitality chains in India and was founded in 2014.

Exotel claims over 1,400 clients and 70 employees. In February, Exotel acquired the voice based media startup Croak.it for an undisclosed amount. Exotel said that this acquisition would help it improve its services, adding that it planned to acquire more startups in the voice space. The company also claimed to have set up about 650 call centres since inception. In 2012, Exotel had raised Rs 2.5 crore in its Series A funding from Blume Ventures and Mumbai Angels in return for a 25% stake.

Exotel provides cloud telephony services for small and medium enterprises including virtual phone numbers, IVR Greetings and call routing, call centre set up and cash on delivery verification among others. The company deploys cloud based telephony solutions to replace communication hardware systems, to reduce costs, space requirements and maintenance efforts.

It also offers a virtual dashboard that offers various tools to help businesses manage several areas like sales, marketing, customer support, business intelligence and analytics. Its client includes taxi aggregator Ola, Lifestyle retailer Zivame and bus ticketing firm RedBus.