Truecaller Lands $18.8M Series B From Sequoia, Partners With Yelp To Verify Business Numbers

Truecaller, the mobile phone number verification directory with over 45 million users, has today secured an $18.8 million Series B financing round led by Sequoia Capital, alongside existing investor Open Ocean, Truecaller Chairman Stefan Lennhammer, and an anonymous private investor “who is known for his high profile Silicon Valley investments,” according to the press release.

Mysterious.

Along with the funding, Truecaller has also announced a partnership with Yelp to help users automatically verify business numbers that are calling your smartphone.

Based out of Stockholm, Sweden, Truecaller helps users identify all the phone numbers calling their smartphone, whether that number is in the Contacts list or not. To add even more verifiable numbers to the Truecaller directory, the company has integrated Yelp’s API data into the app so that business calls don’t come as a surprise.

But beyond showing the name of the Yelp business calling you, Truecaller will also show the business’s Yelp rating, and whether Truecaller users have marked that number as spam.

This isn’t the first time Truecaller has forged partnerships to expand reach. In December, Truecaller partnered with Twitter in India to link phone number lookups with tweets.

In terms of the funding, Truecaller will be using the Series B to expand the business into the U.S., where the company has yet to establish a huge presence.

Eventually, Truecaller will move beyond the freemium model, which lets users see who has searched their number or look up numbers on their own, to promote various businesses within the app.

“If you’re looking for a good pizza place, with our database and your social graph, we can figure which pizza places are the ones your friends actually call or care about,” said Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi. “And that can be a powerful thing.”