We started Vtag because
we kept giving out
our number.
One of us blocked a stranger's car at a wedding. The other got harassed for weeks after writing her number on a windshield. Both moments told us the same thing: the way India shares phone numbers with strangers is broken — and quietly funding the country's spam-call industry.
How we got here.
Two years, slow and deliberate.
The wedding
Aarav blocks a stranger's car at a wedding in Bengaluru. Spends 40 minutes locating the owner via the printed number on the dash. Goes home angry that this is still a problem.
First sketch
First whiteboard drawing of a QR sticker that hides the phone number. Three notebooks of design exploration follow.
First prototype
Priya joins. We print 50 stickers in a Bengaluru garage. Test them on Indiranagar dashboards. They survive monsoon. They survive summer.
Launched quietly
First 100 customers. Word-of-mouth. No marketing spend. Karthik joins as design lead.
Series Seed
Closed a small seed round from privacy-focused angels. We turned down two larger offers because the term sheets included data-monetisation clauses.
1,000+ vehicles tagged
Active in 23 states. 12,400+ messages relayed. Profitable on unit economics. We pick up our own customer-support calls.
What we actually believe.
Not a values poster. Four sentences we use to make actual decisions, including hard ones.
Privacy is not a feature.
It's the entire product. The day we leak one phone number, we close the company. That's not a slogan — it's our operating SLA, written into our investor agreement.
Be invisible.
Good infrastructure shouldn't be noticed. Vtag should disappear into your day, surfacing only when something actually matters. We celebrate when users forget we exist.
Polite tech.
We design for asynchronous, voluntary, low-stakes interactions. No notification spam. No urgency theatre. The slowest rate in the room is usually the right one.
India-first.
Built for Indian streets, Indian phones, Indian parking lots, Indian privacy norms. Localised, not translated. The team is in Bengaluru, the servers are in India, the support is in your timezone.
The team.
Small, intentional, mostly-in-Bengaluru.
Aarav Mehta
CEO & Co-founderEx-Razorpay. Believes parking is a solved problem — we just haven't admitted it yet.
Priya Iyer
CTO & Co-founderEx-CRED. Spent 6 years building anti-fraud systems. Brought that paranoia to Vtag.
Karthik Rao
Head of DesignEx-Zomato. Obsesses over the half-millimetre rounded corner on the QR sticker.
Aisha Khan
Head of OpsEx-Zepto. Owns supply chain, fulfilment, and the phone that rings when something is late.
Vishal Reddy
Lead EngineerEx-Hotstar. Wrote our messaging relay. It's never gone down. He'd like to keep it that way.
Ria Nair
Trust & SafetyEx-Meta. Reads every abuse report. Bans bad actors faster than they can re-register.
Backed by people who care about the same things we do.
We're hiring.
If a privacy-first, India-first, polite-tech company sounds like a place you'd thrive — let's talk.
See open roles