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With focus on innovation, customer service and employee motivation, Arvind Rao has made OnMobile the number one company in Indian VAS industry and plans to further it globally.

In a country where mobile phones have been a phenomenon of only the last decade, starting a company focusing on Value Added Services (VAS) for mobiles and becoming the number one telecom VAS player in the country with a market reach of over 1 billion in 52 countries is an achievement that deserves a standing ovation by all means.

Arvind Rao, OnMobile Global Ltd.

Sample this: Active RBT users/month - 49 million, calls handled/month - 12 billion; unique users/month - 88 million; video content adaptations – 24 million; mobile video ads - 4 million; and you will keep wondering at enormity of these numbers for a VAS company.

With over 20 years of global experience in the wireless telecommunications, private equity, venture capital, and emerging market sectors, Arvind Rao started Onmobile in Jan 2000 in Fremont, California (USA), with a vision to build a huge VAS market with new products and services. In 2003, he moved his core team to India, and by 2005, had Vodafone (erstwhile Hutch), Airtel, Idea, Reliance and BSNL as his customers, which was a victory, if seen in light of the fact that no telecom operator ever entertained mobile application players a decade ago.

The app that gave traction to Onmobile initially was a voice based cricket app which was liked by Hutch and it helped roll it out. In the year 2005, Arvind decided to go international, cracked talks with Syntel Group, and then did not look behind. As more and more international projects came in, Onmobile enhanced presence in Europe, by making acquisition of a French data products company Voxmobili. By 2007, big ticket clients like France Telecom, AT&T, Orange, T-Mobile were in their kitty.

The year 2008 was a breakthrough year for Indian stock market, as even when we had (and still have) big telecom companies like Vodafone and BSNL not listed on exchanges, a home-grown Telecom VAS company (read OnMobile) went for an IPO and got listed. The same year it also acquired a French company specializing in speech recognition. The year 2009 saw two very large global deals (with Vodafone and Telefonica International) for Onmobile.
At every stage, starting from inception, Arvind has played an instrumental role in forging new partnerships with telecom, media and corporate customers, conceiving new business models, identifying and negotiating inorganic growth opportunities for OnMobile globally.

However, the successful journey all along has not been without any learning en route. While technically, they learnt to emphasize on user interface and user experience of a mobile application, with regards to the revenue modeling, they learnt that for a mobile application player it is important to get his/her app live on any network because once s/he is able to script a success story, the whole world will be ready to spend on him/her.

Arvind reveals, “By serving customers really well, delighting them with new innovative and earning products and internally by challenging teams to develop and deliver great products, granting those stock options, making everyone feel like this company was theirs, we have been able to win trust & recognition in market.” To achieve scale, he believes that by developing great products, serving customers well, the references begin working for the business and the rest depends on flawless execution.

Lately, Onmobile has also launched an incubation fund and is looking to fund companies that are in the mobile applications space, on their own and through VCs if required. Verse is one of those startups and has recently got funding from Matrix Partners.