Mobile phonebook management company Dirolabs has raised an additional Rs 1 crore from Naukri.com parent Info Edge, increasing its stake in the startup to 14.77%. This is Info Edge’s second funding in Dirolabs, after having invested Rs 3 crore for 11.5% stake in the company earlier in June this year. Dirolabs’ Phonebooks app isn’t live yet but it has some interesting features like Group Phonebooks, allowing users to share contacts; private phone books, allowing only key members of the group with rights to edit and removing duplicate contacts if there are multiple linked email accounts. The app also syncs with social networks and backs it up on a cloud. The company has offices in Delhi, UK and the United States. As we have mentioned before, the danger for phonebook apps is that, with success and scale, their primary competition will be an OS provider, which has the ability to enable such features natively, without needing to download an application. However, therein also lies the opportunity for such apps: the potential of being acquired by an OS provider. Note that Info edge typically doesn’t do mobile investments and usually invests in online marketplace and transaction businesses. On several conference calls, we’ve questioned Info Edge about not participating in the mobile sector, and frankly, it has been slow even with the transition to mobile for its own applications. With this investment however, it looks like the company is finally prioritizing mobile businesses as well.
