Pune-based phone contact management app, InTouchApp has raised its first round of funding from seed-stage venture fund Blume Ventures. Although the funding amount has not been disclosed, it will be used by the company to expand and focus on its global reach. Founded by Sarang Lakare in 2012, InTouchApp helps in searching and sharing phone contacts with each other and manages over 1.3 billion phone contacts currently. “I knew that the smartphone was going to be central to our lives and the ways phones were looking at address books, it wasn’t very different from the non-connected era of feature phones. I sensed an opportunity to change that and I still think there’s a long road ahead of us,” said Lakare, who returned to India to start InTouchApp after working with Siemens Healthcare for 6 years. The app, available in all smartphone platforms, has seen 2.5 million downloads. Apart from India, the app’s user base is spread across 190 countries like USA, UK, Germany, Indonesia. The app also helps users solve contacts related problems such as backup, and sync. The ability to share and add relevant network seamlessly in a mobile centric era is what the company is trying to solve, said Karthik R eddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures. The Blume team has known and tracked Sarang and In Touch for a while now. We’ve personally been obsessed about finding or supporting a team that saw the problem that we do. And while Sarang had already built a robust product, the next phase is extremely exciting for us – where it moves from utility to a private social network in small organizations and teams,” he said. This is Blume Venture’s latest investment from its $30 million corpus fund raised in December. Last week, it had invested in m.Paani, a loyalty reward platform.
