Nilekani backs mobile data tracker

BENGALURU: Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has invested in Bengaluru-based startup Mubble, his first investment in a mobile tech company and second in an early stage startup this year.
He has previously invested in Bengaluru-based space startup Team Indus that has entered a global competition to soft land a rover on the moon and drive it 500 metres.Nilekani, who has participated in Mubble's Series A fund-raise, is a coach and mentor to the company.
Mubble is a live bill for prepaid users; it gives one-click access to their telecom and mobile data spends. Its patent-pending on-device analytics technologies enable data crunching on the phone, reducing the need to send data out of smartphones to central servers, hence protecting user privacy. "Mubble is like digital anthropology. In anthropology, you live in a village for many months and observe people. In digital anthropology, you are analyzing the way people behave with their smartphones," said Nilekani.
IIT alumni Ashwin Ramaswamy, Pranav Jha and Raghvendra Varma co-founded Mubble in 2013. In less than six months, the app has clocked half a million downloads only by word-of-mouth. "We were having a couple of sundowners on a holiday in Lakshadweep and discussing cricket and India's pre-paid subscribers. We then discovered the pain points of the 100 million prepaid subscribers who have the challenge of keeping track of their voice and data spends," said Ramaswamy, who spent over 18 years in telecom and retail, in companies like Airtel and Jubilant Retail. He met Jha and Varma through common friends. Jha worked in Appnomics and BMC Software and Raghvendra was on the founding team at OnMobile. The founders personally respond to 300-odd email queries they receive from customers every day.
The funds will be deployed to ramp up their engineering talent from 16 to 40 by this year-end. They hire entry-level talent from non-metros. "These guys can relate to the problems of what I call the real India and bring us up to speed on the challenges," he said.
Nilekani noted that some 1 million new smartphones come online every quarter. "For many of them it's their first experience with data. They have been used to voice phones and they are price and value-conscious. Mubble is a trusted advisor to help customers use data efficiently," he said.
The startup is designed to work offline to conserve mobile data balances of its users. Mubble supports seven languages including Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Bengali. "About 80% of our traffic comes from tier-2 cities and 20% from metros," Ramaswamy said.