Omidyar invests $5 million in regional language OS developer Indus

NEW DELHI: Rebranding itself as Indus OS, Firstouch, India’s first regional-language smartphone operating system, has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Omidyar Network. The money will be used to invest in technology, recruit new talent and expand into international markets.

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, the organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic and social change.

Indus OS was founded by three IIT-Bombay graduates, Rakesh Deshmukh (CEO), Akash Dongre (Head of Product) and Sudhir B (Head of Technology). Indus OS follows a three-pronged approach to developing its indigenous operating system – a simple user interface, deep integration of language and technology, and ‘App Bazaar’, a mobile application store targeting the regional-language audience.

Currently available in 12 Indic languages, Indus OS has achieved an installed user base of over 2 million within six months of its launch. Only 10% of Indians count English as their first or second language but it dominates the country’s Internet and mobile phones. Indus OS seeks to radically transform this landscape based on the team’s deep understanding of the regional language audience developed over the years, and to place Indian Internet on a similar trajectory to that of China.

Indus OS targets the next wave of non-English smartphone and internet users ─ numbering several hundreds of millions ─ by enabling usage and discovery of content in vernacular languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Assamese and Urdu.

‘Indus OS is well poised to reach 100 million users in the next three years and emerge as the undisputed leader in indigenous-language technology in emerging markets,” said co-founder and CEO, Rakesh Deshmukh.

The company has partnerships with Micromax, India’s largest domestic mobile brand, as well as Elite, a leading phone brand in Bangladesh. It plans to work with other domestic and global phone brands to bring digital connectivity to smaller urban centers, non-metro and rural areas.

‘We have a strong bias towards technology innovations that solve large-scale problems through local solutions, with the potential to have transformative impact. Indus OS is rare in that it checks the box on all these counts, and we like the IP that this high-quality, dedicated and passionate founding team has created. We are privileged to be a part of this exciting journey,” commented Badri Pillapakkam, Director of Investments at Omidyar Network.

Core features of the Indus OS operating system include a swipe to translate feature that translates and transliterates text messages from English into a regional language with a flick of the hand. It has also developed and patented regional language keyboards customized for 12 languages with predictions to make typing effortless and accurate. It is the first smartphone platform in the world to provide transliteration functionality in Urdu, which is read from right to left.

Indus OS also recently signed a first-of-its-kind MoU with the Government of India’s Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) to develop a native operating system with integrated text-to-speech technology in regional languages. The company is also funded by angel investors such as Snapdeal co-founders Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl, Quikr founder Pranay Chulet and InMobi co-founders Naveen Tewari and Amit Gupta, Hari Padmanabhan and Mayank Singhal from Temasek.