Currently, Indus OS commands a user base of 7 million across its smartphone brand partners including Micromax, Intex, Karbonn, Celkon and Swipe

Indus OS, an India-focussed smartphone operating system (OS), has secured an undisclosed sum in Series A2 funding from VenturEast and JSW Ventures.

Existing investor Omidyar Network has also participated.

The proceeds from this round will be used to hire talent, develop product and further invest in language technology to cover all Indian languages. The company will soon be opening an office in China to further its efforts to partner with international smartphone makers.

“We are already in talks with international and Chinese smartphone brands for the launch of our next version Indus OS 3.0, which we believe will revolutionise the Indian smartphone industry,” said Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-founder and CEO of Indus OS.

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Launched in 2015, Indus OS is a localised, simplified and innovative OS. The company claims it has climbed up to the second position in India within a year of launch, ahead of global giants such as Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows. Currently, it commands a user base of 7 million across its smartphone brand partners including Micromax, Intex, Karbonn, Celkon and Swipe.

According to the company, Indus OS 3.0 will be a major milestone upgrade. For the past year, the team has been working closely with leading hardware and developer partners in the Indian smartphone ecosystem to build the Indus OS 3.0 platform, which will be released in the next quarter.

Gaurav Sachdeva, Managing Partner at JSW Ventures said: “Indus OS’ ecosystem in regional languages will help Indian smartphone users come on the internet, discover services and content with ease. We are glad to back an OS platform innovation that has immense growth potential in the current market conditions tied to the ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives of the Government of India.”

Last year, Indus OS 2.0 introduced ‘Indus Reader’ (text-to-speech) in eight languages, built in partnership with the Government of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Technology (MeitY). It recently released the Recharge 2.0 feature, a dialler-integrated balance-tracking and analytics feature with one touch recharge.

Recently, Indus OS roped in Sunil Lalvani, former Head of Qualcomm and BlackBerry in India, as an Advisor.

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