Sweden based caller identification app Truecaller has acquired payment startup Chillr to boost its payment business in the country, as announced at a press conference in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
The acquisition has come in just after the company announced to roll out credit and other financial services to Indian users in the coming months.
Chillr team members which include Anoop Sankar, Sony Joy, Mohamed Galib and Lishoy Bhaskaran will be absorbed into the company with co-founder Sony Joy serving as the vice president of Truecaller Pay.
Notably, Truecaller had ventured into digital payments last year in India with its UPI service. Co-founder Nami Zarringhalam had earlier informed that the company is incorporating payments as a core part of its offerings.
Commenting on the recent acquisition, he said: “By acquiring Chillr, we are strengthening our plans to increase mobile payments adoption amongst our user base.”
It is crucial to note that Indian payment app Chillr was in news back in April last year when HDFC Bank had launched its UPI on its peer to peer payments app. The startup has already raised a Series A funding round of $7 Mn led by Unicorn Ventures, Blume Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others in December 2015.
Truecaller Pay will include dedicated tabs for payments and banking respectively while in-housing features like send and request money. Moreover, it will facilitate users to transfer money between their own accounts and pay to any mobile number connected to the UPI system, thereby skipping the need for them to remember the recipient’s virtual payment address (VPA).
The call and spam identification app currently has a whopping 150 million user base in India. Moreover, it has over 300 partners in the country where it wants to leverage its payment feature.