Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long left iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering the caller information in real-time — a feature its Android users have enjoyed for some time. Today, that changes as the company is rolling out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to its iOS subscribers.
The company was able to implement the feature because Apple introduced Live Caller ID Lookup in iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to securely make a call to their server to get information about the caller. Notably, this is also the first major release from the Swedish company after the co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from the day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which only around 750,000 of them are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue is from iOS subscriptions. The company also gets a 5X conversation rate to its premium tier on iOS compared to Android as well as 80% higher revenue from an iPhone subscriber.
Considering the importance of the iPhone to Truecaller’s bottom line, the company continues to develop its iOS app.
In 2022, Truecaller relaunched the iOS app to focus on better spam detection, thanks to Apple allowing the app to store a larger set of numbers locally.
“It did improve the overall call identification. But that wasn’t enough because in countries like India, there is a huge calling activity, and not all this would be available in the offline database,” Truecaller Product Director Nakul Kabra told TechCrunch in an interview.
India presents other challenges for the company, as well, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly called CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, currently being rolled out by local telcos, could eventually emerge as a competitor to Truecaller.
Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that involved a step requiring interaction with Siri and also wasn’t real-time.
Until iOS 18’s release, Truecaller had to rely on a locally saved dictionary of limited phone numbers on iOS.
To enable the new feature, Truecaller built a new server architecture and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS, alongside its existing larger database for Android users. Apple’s Phone app makes encrypted requests to this database and gets encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to show the caller ID in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption,” as the computations use encrypted data instead of decrypting them first, while decryption happens on the client to display caller information if it matches with the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller had built a way to sync two databases to keep the data synced between them.
“At the moment, there might be a bit of a delay because these requests get queued up, and the encryption that we do is very time-consuming — and very expensive… But it should not be more than a few hours,” he said.
TechCrunch tested live caller ID under Truecaller’s beta program last week and noticed that the feature does provide caller information in real-time in most cases, though it sometimes misses.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 a month, per individual, or $74.99/year. The company also offers its family plan on iOS starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a year.
Users can enable the Live Caller ID Lookup feature through iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
On iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold over their number. Now, Truecaller is working on support for images to show up in the caller ID for its iOS users.
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With data centers expected to consume as much as 12% of electricity in the U.S. by 2028, it’s no surprise that tech companies are looking for power no matter the source, whether it be nuclear, renewables, or something else entirely. But solar produces a very different type of electric current from a nuclear plant, and integrating various power sources can be challenging.
“We’ve got about 90 gigawatts [of data centers] globally in 2023, and that’s going to increase to over 185 gigawatts by 2028, so it’s only just around the corner,” Gary Lawrence, CEO of Amperesand, told TechCrunch.
Today’s equipment, the transformers that convert power from one format to another, are up to the task, but Amperesand is betting that its technology can do it better and more efficiently.
At its core, Amperesand’s technology replaces the iron cores that define old transformers with silicon carbide. Existing transformers follow the same basic design that has worked well for over a century, but they have their shortcomings. For one, they aren’t good at regulating surges and dips in voltage or frequency. Plus, they have to be tailored to the specific format of electricity they’re looking to transform.
Solid-state transformers made with silicon carbide promise to change that. “The solid-state transformer platform is multi-port by design, it’s modular,” said Brian Dow, Amperesand’s new chief product officer.
“We can make different AC phases, AC to AC, AC to DC. You can natively integrate DC sources like photovoltaic [solar] and batteries. You can integrate with turbines, small modular reactors. And you can basically seamlessly transition between them, so if the grid has an issue, you can back up but also you can come back online.”
Amperesand is in the process of raising a Series A round after it landed a $12.5 million seed round last year, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. “We’ve just kicked off a Series A, and it’s moving really quickly,” said Phil Inagaki, managing partner at Temasek’s Xora Innovations. The company is targeting EV charging and grid applications in addition to data centers, and the solid-state nature of the technology makes it easier to control with software. It demonstrated a 6 megawatt transformer last year.
Xora incubated Amperesand, and Inagaki led the company through its initial formation. Recently, with some funding and a firm strategy in place, he handed the reins to a new leadership team, including Lawrence, Dow, and Tommy Joyner, the company’s new chief technology officer.
The Singapore-based startup is also in the process of opening an office here in the U.S. to be closer to the massive market and to tap local talent. Dow and Joyner, for example, both did stints at Tesla and Generac.
“The U.S. is still where there’s amazing talent that we can capture,” Inagaki said. “We have some in Singapore, but we won’t be able to scale that quickly. So definitely, that talent angle was a big factor.”
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On Monday, while tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sat on stage for President Donald Trump’s inauguration, dozens of founders were at parties all across DC, trying to get an audience with the new president’s inner circle.
To hear them tell it, it wasn’t all that hard. Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor spent the weekend party hopping, rubbing shoulders with Sean Spicer or conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson. Taylor’s company wants to use nuclear power to generate synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. He even scored three separate invites to Mar-A-Lago in the last month by sending a two-page document on changes he’d like to see to nuclear regulations to anyone he knew with DC connections. “People are like, ‘please tell me, how do we fix this? We need to build things again,’” he said of the administration.
His story was surprisingly common. All throughout America’s capital, founders enjoyed the fruits of their industry’s political jockeying. They watched Snoop Dogg at David Sacks’ Crypto Ball, attended a wee-hours crypto rave sponsored by the Milady NFT group, and dressed up for a “Coronation Ball” hosted by a publishing company associated with Curtis Yarvin, the controversial thought leader cited by both Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
Tyler Sweatt, CEO of defense tech startup Second Front Systems, said a huge frustration he’s had with the federal government has been bureaucratic opacity. Founders often can’t even figure out who to contact in the government, much less secure a huge contract.
But Sweatt left events like the vice presidential dinner and Trump’s pre-inauguration candlelight dinner feeling like the country might be entering a rare moment where the federal government, big tech and the startup ecosystem are aligned — and where the shroud surrounding the government’s inner workings might be lifted. “Apolitically, that’s pretty freaking interesting for what could we do as a country,” he said.
At a watch party hosted by conservative organization American Moment, the congressional staffers wore suits with red ties and tech workers wore sneakers. Jacob Martin, general partner of crypto fund 2 Punks Capital and co-founder of gaming guild Ready Player DAO kept watching for news that Trump had immediately pardoned Silk Road’s infamous founder Ross Ulbricht, currently serving life in prison. He did not, despite having promised to do so at a Libertarian convention in May.
Martin also lamented missing his chance to buy the Trump meme coin when it launched at Sacks’ Crypto Ball, a time when top crypto donors were away from their computers. Trading on the coin soon soared. “I could have bought. But I didn’t, because it was clearly a scam, right?” Martin laughed. “There were people who made hundreds of millions on it.”
He hopes the Trump administration can make it so “people are able to utilize blockchain technology to make better things, launch tokens when necessary, and not have to worry about jail time.”
Several founders felt Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will open the floodgates for startups to pitch the government on their products in order to fulfill its promise of making the government more efficient. James Layfield, chief sales officer of Samplify.ai, which helps companies identify redundant software, created a website called “DogeProof.com.’ The concept, he said, is to offer up Samplify.ai’s products to government agencies for free, so they can rid themselves of extraneous subscriptions before Musk comes along to slash their costs.
Layfield pitched it to Florida Representative Byron Donalds at an inauguration ball, and said he seemed intrigued. “The whole experience has been incredibly rewarding to just see how open people are to this possibility,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rabi Alam, founder of Counter Health, hopes that DOGE might support his company’s mission to streamline the healthcare system while keeping the quality of care high. First, though, like everyone in the country, he’s got to figure out what exactly DOGE is. Luckily, Alam scored an invite to the Inauguration Ball, where he intended to scout some DOGE employees. “I’d like to get some of what I’ll call finer granularity and more color on what the approach is,” he said.
If this weekend shows anything, it’s that the hardest challenge founders will face, between balls and Mar-A-Lago trips, might just be staying focused on their day job. “There’s people who are trying to be in the right room,” Taylor said. “And there are people trying to get the work done.”
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In 2023, defense tech recruiter Peterson Conway VIII pulled up to the offices of nuclear fusion startup Fuse in a black Suburban, donning his signature cowboy hat. He picked up a recent Fuse hire and proceeded to regale her with stories of his old recruiting days. One story involved prostitutes attending a recruiting event (“not for sex,” Conway clarified to TechCrunch).
The new hire was not happy. “I thought I told it in a funny way,” Conway sighed, admitting he was being “an a–hole.”
Fuse founder JC Btaiche caught wind of the conversation and agreed, promptly firing Conway — although Btaiche told TechCrunch that telling the prostitution story wasn’t the only inappropriate thing that Conway had done.
But Conway, who has become one of the defense tech industry’s biggest behind-the-scenes power brokers, didn’t give up on Fuse. Conway has recruited for some of the buzziest defense and hard tech firms in Silicon Valley over the last decade, like Palantir and Mach Industries. He spent nearly half a decade doing recruitment for Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC and for its portfolio companies, and since last year, he has been the head of talent at venture firm A*.
So even after being dismissed, Conway continued to pitch candidates to Btaiche and woo prospects with flights in his private plane or offers to “go blow s— up out in the desert,” Conway said. After a few months, Fuse reinstated Conway. He has now recruited more than seven people to Fuse, including Fuse’s chief strategy officer, Laura Thomas, a former CIA officer.
In many ways, Conway is a stand-in for the whole industry: rich, determined, prone to telling unbelievable stories, and, by all accounts, brilliant. According to the dozen people TC interviewed for this story, Conway is wildly successful at luring very talented people away from stable jobs and into startup life. “There’s a line between crazy and genius,” Btaiche said. “And I think he’s just on that line.”
As defense tech funding soared to almost $3 billion last year, Conway is ready to convince the next generation to help make new age nuclear reactors or AI-powered weapons.
“There’s a whole community of young people in the Valley, often working jobs in the defense sector or in national security or on very ambitious, difficult things,” said Gregory Dorman, a recent Princeton graduate who worked with entrepreneur and A* partner Kevin Hartz on his new security startup Sauron, thanks to Conway’s introduction. “And they’re there because of Peterson.”
Conway’s signature move is to take candidates up in his tiny plane. “I like to joke that I make them sick until they accept the terms of our deals,” he said.
I first met him at an airport in San Carlos, California, shortly before I climbed into his tiny two-seater plane, purchased with a loan from Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. A small sign in the cockpit warned me: “This aircraft is an experimental light-sport aircraft and does not comply with federal safety regulations for standard aircraft.”
A few minutes later, we were soaring over the shimmering San Francisco Bay as Conway recounted his fable-like life story. His father, Peterson Conway VII, dodged the draft, sold LSD in Tokyo, and eventually moved to Afghanistan in the ’70s with Conway’s mother, a Mormon school teacher. After a series of escapades across the Middle East and Africa, they moved to Carmel to raise Conway and his brother, but eventually divorced.
“My dad threw himself off there,” Conway said nonchalantly as we soared over the Golden Gate Bridge. He then explained that the attempted suicide was unsuccessful. His father was caught by the nets and is alive and well today, selling antiques in his Carmel shop.
Conway rebelled against his father by briefly pursuing normalcy, attending Dartmouth to study economics. But after college, in the early 2000s, he found himself becoming a recruiter.
In Conway’s version of events, he was riding his motorcycle around San Francisco, a cowboy in search of office space. He spotted a warehouse with a ramp, rode onto it, and ran straight into Hartz. At the time, Hartz was in the early stages of building Xoom, a fintech service for international money transfers that was eventually bought by PayPal.
Conway said Hartz asked him if he had any skills. “None,” Conway answered. “But I can bring lunches. I’m a decent writer. I had an Airstream trailer — I’m like, we can go surfing.”
Hartz laughed when I asked him about the story, saying, “That is all entirely false.” According to Hartz, Conway simply rented office space in the same building and that’s how he started recruiting for Xoom and, later, the broader PayPal crowd.
When PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel launched Palantir in 2003, Conway was in the right place at the right time and began recruiting for the firm. Conway apparently had no official title at the defense company, ”but was ‘just Peterson,’” like a defense tech “mononymous artist in the style of Prince or Madonna,” joked Gabe Rosen, 8VC’s resident humanities scholar who worked with Conway at Palantir.
Palantir sent Conway across the world to build out its international teams. According to Conway, the company wanted employees with an “internal compass and conviction,” people who had grappled with the values they were raised with and paved their own path.
For example, Conway claimed he would get missives like “find me a Jew that married a Christian from the outback of Australia that was gay.” Palantir had no comment.
Conway was known for getting recruits’ attention by sending handwritten letters with wax seals. His methods were successful, landing people like Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and many of Palantir’s international hires.
Last summer, Conway and his father flew to the Mojave desert in Hartz’s plane, borrowed for the occasion. Like some kind of American Dynamism mirage, they saw a gaggle of young men mounting a drone to the back of a truck.
It was a testing session for Mach Industries, a weapons company founded by Ethan Thornton when he was 19 years old. Mach is one of the handful of defense and hardware companies that has Conway recruited for as head of talent at A*. Mach has since raised over $80 million from investors like Bedrock and Sequoia Capital.
While those men set up orange cones and explosive equipment for their engineering tests, Conway took people for trips in Hartz’s plane. “He hit the ground so hard, so many times, landing in the Mojave,” Hartz sighed. “Everything came loose.” Conway denied Hartz’s account, saying the plane simply “got pretty dirty” and he lost a window covering.
According to Conway, he recruited SpaceX alum Gabriela Hobe and Fasil Mulatu Kero, Mach’s vice president of manufacturing and former Tesla employee. “Ethan has probably paid me over a million dollars to do what I do for him,” Conway said, although he later denied that figure.
It seems like everyone in the defense tech industry has an eye-popping story about Conway. One time, after Conway ordered an Uber and hit it off with the driver, he surprised a founder by setting him up with a ride and telling the founder to interview the driver for a job.
Another time, Fuse founder Btaiche said Conway left a Porsche with the keys in it at the airport for a recruit, who was then a government contractor, to drive when he touched down. The company later clarified that it was a four-seater Porsche, loaned to the candidate so the company could save money on Ubers.
The candidate took the Porsche for their meetings and ended the day at Conway’s home, a sprawling compound in the wealthy California coastal town Carmel-by-the-Sea, stuffed with his father’s antiques and animal parts from hunting expeditions. Conway hosts regular dinners for candidates there (his father cooks), as well as, according to Conway, parties ranging from a birthday bash for Joe Lonsdale to a wedding for Sankar.
But Btaiche said Conway’s real superpower isn’t his stunts, but rather his ability to talk about “candidates in a more human way, rather than just looking at résumés and credentials.”
For Fuse hiring, Conway had Btaiche brainstorm what upbringing might create someone who can lead a team, or bring new ideas to the engineers; as a result, they’ve scouted people from rural areas, people who grew up as athletes, and people who are obsessed with gaming.
As for winning candidates over, Btaiche said that Conway sells people on the imperative of defending America. “If you’re working on something that is truly mission-driven,” he said, “I think Peterson can deliver that story.”
Dorman, one of the people who had the Conway Experience, was a philosophy major at Princeton debating between careers in the Valley or New York when he met the famed recruiter. Conway persuaded him to choose the Valley. “Peterson convinces people that there’s actually a lot of adventure there,” he said.
Conway has fashioned himself as something of a cowboy in the Valley for years, and now the rest of tech might have finally caught up. He applauds the current interest in American Dynamism, the term coined by Andreessen Horowitz for government-adjacent companies. “It is just perfect. It is right on the border of fanaticism,” Conway said. “It’s become its own religion.”
There’s a common theme in how people describe Conway: a genius, an influential player in defense tech, and, at times, a liability.
For instance, a few days after I flew in his plane, he called me and asked, “Did you see the news?”
The day before, Conway had taken a 6 a.m. flight from the Carmel area to Silicon Valley. In the early morning darkness, Conway failed to pull out a flashlight when he was checking his fuel gauge and, as a result, misread the gauge. “I made an assumption that was entirely pilot error,” he said. As he was flying, he realized he didn’t have enough in the tank to make it to the nearest airport.
Conway regaled the story to me in mythical proportions: a fork in his path, a choice between good and evil. As he described it, he initially thought his best chance at living was to land on a sports field at a nearby school. “I started freaking out that a kid was no match for a propeller,” he said.
So he opted to land his plane on Highway 85, touching down toward oncoming traffic in hopes that it would be safer for drivers. Miraculously, his two-seater glided onto the concrete, leaving Conway and the surrounding cars unharmed.
Conway then warned me that I had been a hair’s breadth away from a similar fate. “If we had flown any further, we would’ve run out of gas,” he said.
That wasn’t quite true; he told me later that he had flown the plane at least one time after our flight. But he painted our journey together in an existential light, making it unforgettable. After spending the day with him (and a subsequent two months fact-checking his many exaggerations), I learned that Conway is singular in his epic storytelling skills. That’s why he gets hired by so many amazing companies. And fired. And then rehired once again.
As Dorman put it, “He’s a super unconventional recruiter.” Yet, he’s also “better than any other recruiter.”
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