“Now the world have the opportunity to let the world see Taiwan Network team innovative strength .” By Gogolook CEO Jeff Kuo.
Taiwanese startup team ‘Gogolook’ had been celebrating since the good news spread. The team’s product for identifying and blocking calls – Whoscall – has recently announced that they have being acquired by South Korea’s largest Internet service company NAVER Corporation. NAVER acquired Gogolook through its subsidiaries ‘Camp Mobile’ at a reported price of over US$10 million. That is more NT $ 300 million, a big amount in Taiwan.
NAVER ‘s products include one the largest search engine of Korea, NAVER, one of the world ‘s largest Internet gaming site HangGame, as well as global messaging app LINE, which we have covered extensively on Vulcan Post. LINE reported that they have over 300 million users using its messaging app now.
According to the external relations department of Gogolook, after joining NAVER family, Gogolook still remain an independent entity and retain its flexibility to conduct independent research and development. Gogolook also told Vulcan Post that it expect the company to grow from the original 10 person team to over 50 employees. They will continue to focus on their main product Whoscall, as well as expanding its scope of services, with an eye for the global market.
LINE Whoscall – A whole new product
With LINE Whoscall, you can instantly identify the source of calls and text messages even if the caller’s number is not in your contact list. LINE Whoscall also helps you block specific numbers.
Why did NAVER spent millions to acquire and integrate Whoscall into their service? You might recall that LINE allows you to call other LINE users for free. With Whoscall, which has over 600 million numbers in its database, LINE Whoscall is now able to filter over 20 million calls and about 500,000 malicious calls are blocked by users everyday.
Whoscall also has a various partnerships with local businesses, such as local stores and Black Cat Delivery companies. At LINE prepares its entry into the e commerce space, LINE users are now able to identify calls from shipping companies, and will not assume the call is by a stranger.
What makes them so attractive? The competence of Gogolook
Perhaps another reason why the Gogolook team was acquired is that it has precious know-hows of data analyses. The team is able to determine if a call is a marketing call based on various calling models, a sophisticated formula developed based on the frequencies of call, the calling time and various other factors. This helps LINE control the amount of spam calls that might potentially harm the company as it grows bigger.
The capabilities to analyze huge data are rare among Taiwan’s startup teams. This might be the main reason why NAVER admired the Gogolook team, and therefore, is willing to pay more than NT $300 million dollars to integrate the team into the NAVER team.
The birth of each new startup, successful fund raising cases, as well as successful exits such as the case of Whoscall, is great news for the Taiwan startup ecosystem. The acquisition of Gogolook proves that Taiwan startups are capable of standing in the global stage, and it leaves a huge shoe to be filled by other startup teams.
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