Indus OS, the company building a forked version of Google’s Android OS customized for Indian masses, has today announced that it has raised a new round of funding – Series A2 – from JSW Ventures and VenturEast. The amount raised by the company has not been disclosed yet.
Along with VentureEast and JSW Ventures, existing investor Omidyar Network has also participated in the current round. Rakesh Deshmukh, co-founder & CEO, Indus OS, said in a statement:
Funds from Series A2 will be invested to hire top industry talent and further product development and innovation. We are already in talks with international and Chinese smartphone brands for the launch of our next version – Indus OS 3.0.
The company was founded by three IIT-Bombay alumni — Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre, and Sudhir B in the year 2015. Its vision is to build an end-to-end ecosystem which would bridge the digital divide and get emerging markets on the information highway, with language being the key.
It is targeting the rural population of India and they came into this market prepared. In the initial three years, the company carried out extensive research on consumer attitudes, mobile devices, and possible technology solutions.
Indus OS, which was formerly called Firstouch, is currently the number two mobile OS in India, with a 7.6% market share. It claims to have a user base of 7 million across its smartphone brand partners, including Micromax, Intex, Karbonn, Celkon, and Swipe.
Last year, Indus OS 2.0 had introduced ‘Indus Reader’ (text-to-speech) in eight Indian languages, built in partnership with Ministry of Electronics and Technology (MeitY). It recently released the Recharge 2.0 feature, dialer integrated balance-tracking, and analytics feature with one-touch recharge. In January, FreeCharge partnered with Indus OS for direct integration on smartphones using this platform.
The company has said that the Indus OS 3.0 platform will be released next quarter. The company believes it will alleviate some of the major pain points for Indian smartphone users. It further added that it will soon be opening an office in China to further its efforts to partner with international smartphone brands.
