Stockholm-based wifi community Instabridge has raised a $3m Series A round led by London’s Balderton Capital and Sweden’s MOOR, and joined by Creandum and Swisscom Ventures.
The app enables people to connect to any wifi hotspot shared within the community, with a focus on helping people in developing countries with more basic handsets get online.
It runs constantly in the background, which saves battery life, and the team is working on a proprietary algorithm to enable the app to make the best decision about which spot to connect to.
Instabridge has surpassed 1 million registered users and more than 500,000 hotspots have already been logged across Brazil, Mexico and India, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada and the US.
The app is yet to go live on iOS but a preview version is available ahead of its autumn launch.
“It’s fascinating to think how many people we are helping to get online every day,” said Niklas Agevik, CEO of Instabridge, which he cofounded in 2013. “It’s one of the things that make us truly love working at Instabridge. We are thrilled to have Moor and Balderton on board and are excited that they share our long-term vision of becoming the way people get online. Their experience and know-how will be invaluable.”
“Niklas is an inspirational entrepreneur, who has built a company that solves a real problem,” said Daniel Waterhouse, general partner at Balderton Capital. “At the moment, connecting to wifi is a broken and painful experience due to convoluted login procedures and high drop-off rates.
“This is particularly true in emerging markets, where many users don’t have constant access to high-speed data, and handsets are far more commonly used as WiFi-first devices. Instabridge have built a solution to this problem that enables users to access a crowd-sourced network of free-to-access WiFi spots via a beautiful user-experience. We are very excited to work with them.”
Instabridge is currently a free service while the team focuses on user and hotspot acquisition, but they are planning to introduce a premium version next year.