Swedish unicorn app Truecaller sheds jobs
Maddy Savage - [email protected]
Published: 11 Dec, 2015 CET.
Updated: Fri 11 Dec 2015 16:14 CET
Swedish caller ID app Truecaller has confirmed to The Local that a number of consultants and full time employees have been made redundant by the firm, which is one of the country's most successful startups.
"We have let a number of consultants and few full-time employees go recently which is natural to any company in a high growth stage," Kim Fai Kok, Director of Communications for the company told The Local on Friday.
His comments came after an anonymous source emailed The Local suggesting that as many as 35 people had been fired due to "financial problems" at the firm.
Fai Kok did not immediately respond to a question about whether or not that figure was accurate.
The Nordic startup is a unicorn, which means its valuation has exceeded $1 billion dollars. It reported having 150 million users in July 2015, mostly in India.
Launched by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam in 2009, the Truecaller app works by bringing together global directory services with crowdsourced information from users in order to create a database of phone numbers. This allows customers to be informed about who is calling them.
It also uses data analytics to offer services such as predicting who users might want to call based on their location or the time of day, as well as tools designed to block spam and generate automatic text messages.
The company makes its money through in-app purchases of its premium features as well as advertising.
Last year it scored venture capital funding from Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström's Atomico investment firm. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an investor in US messaging companies Twitter and Snapchat has also invested in the company.
The company reported sales of 6.7 million ($788,000) in 2014, Swedish media reported on Friday, alongside losses of almost 85 million kronor.
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"We have let a number of consultants and few full-time employees go recently which is natural to any company in a high growth stage," Kim Fai Kok, Director of Communications for the company told The Local on Friday.
His comments came after an anonymous source emailed The Local suggesting that as many as 35 people had been fired due to "financial problems" at the firm.
Fai Kok did not immediately respond to a question about whether or not that figure was accurate.
The Nordic startup is a unicorn, which means its valuation has exceeded $1 billion dollars. It reported having 150 million users in July 2015, mostly in India.
Launched by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam in 2009, the Truecaller app works by bringing together global directory services with crowdsourced information from users in order to create a database of phone numbers. This allows customers to be informed about who is calling them.
It also uses data analytics to offer services such as predicting who users might want to call based on their location or the time of day, as well as tools designed to block spam and generate automatic text messages.
The company makes its money through in-app purchases of its premium features as well as advertising.
Last year it scored venture capital funding from Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström's Atomico investment firm. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an investor in US messaging companies Twitter and Snapchat has also invested in the company.
The company reported sales of 6.7 million ($788,000) in 2014, Swedish media reported on Friday, alongside losses of almost 85 million kronor.
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