Announcing our first investment: Instabridge, enables mobile internet access to billions of people for free
By: Magnus Bergman, General Partner, Luminar Ventures
Today, we’re excited to announce our first investment at Luminar Ventures: Instabridge.
Instabridge; a Stockholm based company helps users find and connect to fast and free mobile internet wherever they are.
Internet access is considered a human right by the United Nations, and access to the internet is proven to reduce economic and gender inequalities, stimulate economic growth and giving citizens access to important public services. Yet getting online is still a challenge for billions of people. Instabridge aims to change that.
Instabridge is offering an app that has connected millions of Wi-Fi hotspots globally into a virtual mobile network, in which the users can seamlessly reach the Internet for free. This is a massively appealing alternative to mobile internet access. In most countries data plans are still expensive, and in developing countries mobile networks have limited reach and bandwidth. Although available mobile internet capacity from operators will continue to grow the need for mobile data will grow much faster. Users around the world want to watch video, listen to music and reach their social media, news and friends anywhere and anytime. Mobile Wi-Fi solutions like the one Instabridge has developed can bridge that widening gap between user needs and available mobile networks capacity. This is also the underlying premises for the coming 5G rollout, where Instabridge is very uniquely and attractively positioned.
Moreover, more than half of the world’s population is still without internet access, and companies like Facebook and Google are working hard to provide access in places where connection is a challenge. Google launched Project Loon, a network of balloons designed to provide internet connectivity to people in rural and remote areas. And Facebook has several projects aimed at expanding the reach of internet access, like the solar powered drone Aquila and a satellite launch with SpaceX.
Making wi-fi networks more accessible is one way of helping people get online. For Instabridge, the vision is to help billions of users access the internet via hotspots and to build the world’s largest WI-FI access network — without investing in new hardware.
In China, this approach has reached major adoption. One example is the app Wi-Fi Master Key that also makes WI-FI access seamless. The app has become one of China’s top 5 most popular applications. Instabridge aims to be the largest Wi-Fi access platform outside of China.
Instabridge is well on its way to reach that goal. The company has achieved major adoption with millions of monthly active users and is seeing rapid growth. The biggest country for Instabridge is today Brazil where the brand is widely recognised, and Mexico is not far behind as the second largest country
Instabridge is founded by Niklas Agevik (CEO) and Erik Tigerholm (CTO). Niklas, who has been Instabridge front man is a very talented and hardworking product driven entrepreneur that could become the next tech super star from Sweden. I meet him five years ago and have been following him and the Instabridge team ever since. Over the years the founding team has been able to attract key people from Yelp, Rovio, etc to help executing on their global growth plan.
As first angel investor in Truecaller 2009 I had the privilege to work with Alan and Nami throughout their exceptional growth journey, and I see a lot of similarities between Truecaller and Instabridge. Both companies are solving a very important and concrete need for billions of people, the product is community driven and super scalable with a focus on developing countries, and both companies have a very strong tech and product team executing relentlessly on an ambitious vision. Today Truecaller is a powerhouse in emerging markets with a leading position in India and now moving into the rest of the world including Africa. In the early years, Truecaller had a similar adoption- and growth rate. If Instabridge continues to grow in todays rate the company will have hundreds of millions of users in just a few years’ time.
Instabridge is one of few companies in the Nordics that is working on solving the important challenge of global internet access. We see Instabridge as a continuation of the telecom heritage once pioneered by Swedish companies like Ericsson, and we’re proud to be part of this journey.
Magnus Bergman, General Partner at Luminar Ventures AB
