Antler East Africa partners with Truecaller to support Founders.

Antler enables exceptional people to build impactful technology startups by building complementary co-founding teams, supporting the teams with deep business model validation, providing a global platform for scaling their startups, and investing in them.

At such an early stage, one of the most crucial insights any startup would find valuable is the know-how of building efficient products and growth strategy. Truecaller on the other hand has successfully built and refined, a product that millions of people across the world love.

Today, the app has over 230 million active users globally and has grossed over 500 million app installs to date. Keeping this in mind, we had launched our partnership with Truecaller in Africa, to drive value for our startups with learnings around building products at scale and optimizing for growth - which Truecaller has consistently learned and implemented at scale while building for global users over the years.

With this partnership, Truecaller's platform team has added a lot of value by providing one-on-one mentorship and extremely insightful masterclasses on topics of digital identity, building Machine Learning Products, and Engineering practices for Startups. With Truecaller being a mobile-only platform with a focus on emerging markets from the start, their team has been sharing deep insights on topics that are fundamental to product development, helping the founders avoid common mistakes and understand the most up-to-date product development methods.

We kicked off our first session with Truecaller in April 2020 and have been able to host several virtual masterclasses. Truecaller's team has also been mentoring some of our startups in Africa to help them leverage their developer solutions which could further help these startups in driving growth on their mobile-led platforms.

Talking about this first VC collaboration in Africa, Priyam Bose - Global Head for Developer Platform at Truecaller said, "We cater to millions of users in Africa who love and use Truecaller for their daily communication needs. As we continue to expand our collaboration with key enablers of the digital ecosystem in Africa, we have partnered with leading early-stage VC Antler to enable local African startups with our learnings from emerging markets, from product building to mentorship to tools which they can leverage from Truecaller platform to build discoverable, frictionless and scalable go to market consumer experiences."

Testimonial from Antler Nairobi portfolio, Digiduka, who have integrated their products with the Truecaller SDK:

"Digiduka implemented the Truecaller SDK to reduce friction and SMS related costs by sending out the "one-time password" or OTP for short, which is used once to sign up, as well as during login. The service allows Digiduka users who are also registered on Truecaller to use their Truecaller ID to instantly log in to the Digiduka App at the touch of a button. Replacing the SMS OTP with Truecaller's single sign-in SDK makes the user experience seamless and reliable. In turn, significantly removes both growth and cost friction for us. We also use the SDK to pre-fill registration fields for new users, making the signup process easy and intuitive." Says Lovell Larbie, CTO,Digiduka.

We are always looking for ways to collaborate with local ecosystem players, tech firms and organisations that are looking to support entrepreneurs. Reach out to nairobi@antler.co if you want to have a chat.