Truecaller Acquires Payments App Chillr, Announces Truecaller Pay 2.0 Launch

Aiming to strengthen its business in India, Truecaller on Wednesday announced it has acquired Chillr. Truecaller forayed into the digital payments segment in India in March last year. The company also announced the launch of Truecaller Pay 2.0, and said the size of its team in India has more than doubled with the acquisition.

"Since launching Truecaller Pay in 2017, we've seen an increasing number of use cases to make the lives of our users in India easier. By acquiring Chillr, we are reaffirming our commitment to mobile payments and strengthening our plans to increase its adoption amongst our user base," Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Truecaller, said in a statement.

The founders of Chillr - Sony Joy, Anoop Sankar, Mohamed Galib and Lishoy Bhaskaran - will join Truecaller, along with the rest of the team. Joy will be appointed Vice President of Truecaller Pay.

According to Chillr, it is planning to leverage its full reach of over 150 million users in India as well as its over 300 existing partnerships to enable Truecaller Pay as a platform.

"We will, together, have a far bigger impact in this space through the foundation of the team's expertise and a strong user base that trusts our platform and use it on a daily basis," said Zarringhalam.

Truecaller Pay is a UPI-based mobile payments service that was launched in partnership with ICICI Bank. All the banking and transactional data of the customers is handled by ICICI Bank as per RBI guidelines, and Truecaller will not handle data such as account details, or credit or debit card information of its users. It has been designed as a feature within the Truecaller app itself - you won't need to download or install any standalone app.