Helping users take charge of their data, one call at a time: Why We Invested in Doosra

^{“By providing a secondary, virtual mobile number, Doosra serves as a digital identity layer for individuals, providing them with more control over their privacy and sensitive data shared during online transactions. Separately, by providing efficient and low-cost customer engagement tools (such as virtual mobile platform, instant light IVR, etc.) to businesses at extremely affordable prices, Doosra is enabling SMBs and startups to improve sales practices and customer experience”}

Imagine you’re in the middle of a packed day at work. Your phone rings. It’s a call from a landline. It probably is a tele-marketer, but it could also be your bank, or the airline with some information on an upcoming flight. You answer the phone. It’s a tele-marketer. You hang up. Annoyed at yourself for taking the bait.

You’re not alone in your annoyance. About 96% of all our compatriots receive spam texts every day. Such calls and messages also lead to more sinister things – 24% of Indians have suffered from online financial fraud. Data leaks are unfortunately, an all too common phenomenon with all types of businesses.

On the flip side though, by accessing your data, the apps you use are actually able to serve you better – recommendations for where to seek housing or what to order for a weekend dinner.

Legislation like the Personal Data Protection Bill will go a long way in helping safeguard your data and give you the agency to decide how it gets to used. It will also need to be balanced by how companies can access the information in order to serve you.

Doosra is aiming to strike this balance by trying to be the ‘digital identify platform for India’s internet’. The platform and service enables individuals to better manage their digital identities, reducing privacy risks while maintaining their convenience when they are dealing with businesses.

It provides a virtual second phone number, which you can use on any smartphone without a dual SIM feature or an additional SIM card. Unlike a SIM card, you can set it up instantly and completely online. It also provides a sophisticated call management app, which gives users more control over incoming communication through its features which includes:

• All incoming calls and SMSs to a Doosra number are blocked by default — and instead appear in the Doosra app.
• Users can fix rules to manage blocking. e.g., allowing for trusted contacts, specified times daily (e.g. business hours), when they are in a particular location (e.g. her business), trusted services (e.g. Amazon) or for an extended duration (e.g. house-hunting).
• Non-blocked calls are forwarded to the main phone number. 
• Users can also call back blocked calls from a masked phone number using free call credits.

Further, Doosra also offers customer engagement tools for businesses - publicly sharable virtual mobile numbers for advertising and marketing, instant IVR, WhatsApp business account,  streamlined methodology for capturing leads, and a secure callback option. This service for businesses is affordable – 8-10 times lower than other engagement tools available. It is also easy to integrate and can be set up for a company in less than an hour. This makes the Doosra for business solution highly suited for SMBs and startups, enabling them to improve their customer engagement and sales experience.

Doosra’s long-term vision is to protect the privacy of an individual’s digital identities (phone, email, credit card, username + password, etc.) by tokenising them, and by converting the Doosra mobile app into a one-stop, privacy-protecting digital identity wallet that individuals can use to transaction online, with Doosra for business becoming a trusted, and go-to customer engagement solution for SMBs and startups.

We believe by helping protect individual agency and giving its users the power to decide who has access to their data, Doosra is playing an important role in helping its users protect their individual agency. And we hope, its elegant solution will help not just spam calls and messages but also encourage more innovators to follow suit.