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ZipDial, the 'Missed Call' Startup Became Twitter's First Ever Indian Acquisition

SI Team
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
SI Team
Missed calls have been an integral part of the mobile user behavior in India ever since the advent of first mobile phones in the sub content. The trend still holds strong even when the country is termed to be the fastest growing smartphone market in the world. The reason people give missed call could be because of high call and data charges or erratic internet access or to convey some predicated message such as "call me back." Valeri Wagoner left the Silicon Valley to explore the untapped potential the emerging markets like India offered. She set to leverage the ubiquitous behavior of "missed calls" between friends and applied it as an offline call-to-action for brand engagement through her startup ZipDial. The young company which Valeri cofounded with Amiya Pathak and Sanjay Swamy has now became the first ever Indian Startup acquired by Twitter and the deal is estimated to be worth between $30 million and $40 million.
ZipDial, the pioneer in bridging the offline and online gap has served the e-commerce players like Amazon, Flipkart and Uber to push their mobile phone app downloads. Today, the company serves around 500 clients, including India's largest telecom operator Airtel, online travel agent MakeMyTrip and the Disney channel. The Bangalore-based firm is already present in Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Philippines, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where a large number of people still don't have access to the internet.
While Twitter has about $22 million users India, ZipDial has a staggering $60 million. With ZipDial, Twitter intends to offer its services even to the offline users. "We'll continue building upon the existing ZipDial platform, and now, by coming together with Twitter, we have the tremendous opportunity to elevate everything we've built to a global scale. Our ambitious goal is to make Twitter's unique, great content accessible to 100 percent of the world's mobile users," as Valeri stated on ZipDial's website.


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