Mobile based directory service Truecaller has raised $18.8M in fund raising from Sequoia Capital, Open Ocean, Truecaller Chairman Stefan Lennhammer, and an unnamed private investor. The Stockholm based venture with a significant user base in India has company has 45 million users who currently utilize the service to identify unknown phone numbers. Shailesh Lakhani from Sequoia Capital has joined the company's board. The fund raising confirms a story from NextBigWhat which had initially been denied by Truecaller's Kim Fai Kok, after which, understandably enough, that denial had been retracted. Prior to this, the Sweden-based global phone directory service had raised an investment of $1.3 million from the Open Ocean in September 2012. It claims to have 40 million users globally, of which 22 million users are in India. What's interesting is that the announcement press release tries to re-position Truecaller as a service which helps users identify spam callers: "The Truecaller community is committed to protecting the integrity of the service by giving users access to advanced discovery features such as the ability to search for names, use reverse phone number lookup, share information, and access crowdsourced data to build the world’s largest list of top phone spammers, which has already helped block more than 1 billion unwanted calls in less than a year."..."you can quickly look to see who the caller is, and if it has been marked as spam by other users. Any user can report a caller as spam to enhance the community, and after successive reports within a defined period, that number…
