VoIP service provider Nanu has shut its Indian operations, citing a lack of clarity from the Indian telecom regulator TRAI. Nanu had tied up with telecom operators to allow users to call regular phone numbers using Internet Telephony, with the call being funded by advertisers. To enable this, they were paying telecom operators a "termination fee", for allowing the VoIP call to connect to a regular phone call. Martin Nygate, CEO of Nanu, said that the company was growing very fast in India: "we had around 35,000 users signing up every day, completely organically. Our daily active users and monthly active users were far in excess of similar apps. Our daily active user rate was around 18% and our monthly active user rate was around 32% or 42%", and, "Statistically we were growing very fast and our usage rate was very healthy. India was around 57% of our market for all users, and it was all fine." "We particularly developed this application for the Indian market. We had an innovation in our product that we ran on very very low bandwidth. We ran with 50-80% less bandwidth than Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat. Because of this, we were working very well in 2G and congested 3G, which is a majority of India. We're still getting emails from India, saying please bring back Nanu. Understand that this lack of (regulatory) clarity meant that we spend all of our investment funds on developing the Indian market. Once we ran out because of…
