Mobile WiFi Community Instabridge raises $1 million


    Stockholm-based Instabridge is back in the news again after raising a $1 million seed round (€780,000) from a group of investors led by Swedish VC Creandum. Getting the rest of the invesmtent news out of the way, the round also included GP Bullhound, business angels such as Niall Murphy, former CTO of TheCloud; Scott Bannister, early board member of PayPal; and Felix Hagnö, co-founder and former CTO of TradeDoubler.

    How the startup works is pretty cool. Instabridge provides a crowdsourced network of WiFi hotspots where users of one WiFi hotspot can share the credentials with other users of the Android app, giving you a newly updated “WiFi client” with that sleek swedish design, helping you save money on roaming costs or hitting your data limit.

    In relative terms this seed round is a long time coming for Instabridge. We first wrote about the company’s beta launch back in November of 2012, but growth seems to be picking up. On the network side users are adding 1,000 new hotspots a day, and talking about users the company says that 20,000 connections are made daily.

    In Instabridge’s native Sweden, mobile data is cheap and plentiful which explains why most of their growth is coming from emerging markets like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and India, but other popular markets include Spain, the Netherlands, Canada and the US.

    ”It’s fascinating to think how many people we are helping to get online every day. It’s one of the things that makes us truly love working with Instabridge. We are humbled to have Creandum and experienced angel investors on board and are excited that they share our long-term vision of becoming the way people get online. Their experience and know-how from companies such as Spotify and Videoplaza have been invaluable” says Niklas Agevik, CEO and co-founder of Instabridge.