Customized ringtones, those pop song snippets assigned to specific callers, have gone the way of the flip phone, at least in the United States. But in India and other areas where smartphones have yet to hit market saturation ringtones remain a novelty ripe for evolution. Vyng has taken the customized call signal to the next level with a free Android-only app that allows callers to dictate the video clip that appears on the lockscreen of the person they’re calling. And it’s paying off.
On Thursday, Vyng (rhymes with “ring’) announced a $4 million Series A round, boosting the Los Angeles-based startup’s funding to $7 million, from returning investor March Capital Partners and the India arm of investment firm Omidyar Network. “There are 8 billion phone calls happening every single day and they’re so generic,” Vyng CEO and cofounder Paul Kats told Forbes. According to Kats, whose success put him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2019, Vyng is now used in a fourth of those daily calls via its user base in more than 170 countries.
The appeal seems obvious. Our communication through technology is increasingly visual. Images are now the language of social media. We share our emotions through emojis and react to news from our friends, family and coworkers via an infinite library of gifs. Now, app users can spruce up their incoming calls with a revolving gallery of Bollywood dance scenes, frolicking kittens, or in an upcoming addition to the app, their own custom videos. To paraphrase Drake, “When that hotline bling, (and it’s a video of a cat) that can only mean one thing, Vyng.
Of course, the phone on the receiving end must also have the Android-only app installed for the video to appear. Not a problem in India, where Google’s operating system dominates the market and the pricey iPhone makes up less than 1%. No wonder Vyng has no immediate plans to move into Apple’s App Store.
Cofounder Jeffrey Chernick kicked off the concept for Vyng when he used voice memo as a ringtone. Chernick, Kats and their third cofounder, Sohrab Pirayesh, saw the potential in making phones more personable by leveraging content and allowing phone contacts to choose the video that appears when they call.
The trio then raised money from their friends and family to start Vyng in 2014. The idea was to make your phone more personable by leveraging content and allowing phone contacts to choose the video that appears when they call. “Video is in every app, it’s the way we communicate with each other,” Chernick told Forbes. “Ringtones are a form of self-expression, when you add video to it’s an enhanced experience.”
In a world where video content rules, whether it’s a custom user-generated video or a viral clip cycling on social media, the cofounders say that content marketed itself. They credit word of mouth as their best form of brand awareness with 78% of users discovering the app either through seeing a Vyng ringtone in action or through a referral from other users wanting to assign a video on their friend’s phone.
Widely popular in emerging markets, in particular India, there are over 3,000 tutorials on YouTube demonstrating how to set up Vyng ringtones in English, Hindi, Malayalam and Bangla. It was in their meeting with Omidyar that the cofounders first learned of one tutorial that has amassed 1.6 million views.
One trip through the download process reveals the opportunities Vyng offers to internet influencers and product placement. After the users grants the app access to the phone’s gallery and audio features, Vyng opens up to a database of 6 million videos crowdsourced by users as well as content provided by multi-channel network’s Jukin Media and Yoola. What’s the most trendy source of Vyng tones these days? TikTok, the blockbuster Chinese social video app, which comes as no surprise since the platform for teens shares videos that has the same major demographic of young women as Vyng.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated total funding.
