Open Garden nets $10.8M to expand mesh-networking FireChat app
Open Garden, the company behind the offline messaging app FireChat that doesn’t need a mobile network, has just announced a fresh funding round of $10.8 million to boost its growth in emerging markets.
The FireChat app was only released this year, but it’s quickly gained in popularity due to its ability to connect smartphone users when they’re off-the-grid. Rather than use a cellular or Wi-Fi connecting, it relies on the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi receivers built into devices. The technology is known as “mesh-networking”, and has helped protesters to communicate when mobile networks are shut down or overwhelmed by congestion.
FireChat shot to fame during this year’s anti-government protests in Hong Kong – at the height of the protests it gained 100,000 users within the first 24 hours, and by the end of the week it had more than 500,000 new users. Besides this, FireChat has also proven popular with festival-goers too, most recently at the Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, reports the New York Times. It now boasts some 5 million users worldwide.
“There’s been a lot of promise with mesh networking, but this is the first company to get it working at scale,” said Howard Hartenbaum, the partner at August Capital who led the latest investment round.
The latest round brings the total amount of funding Open Garden’s raised to $12.8 million, and the company itself is now valued at over $40 million. Most of the new cash will be used to expand FireChat’s user base, with the company planning to focus on Asia, India and Latin America – emerging markets where cheap smartphones abound, but where infrastructure is poor, and data prices remain somewhat steep for the average consumer.
“The technology is in its infancy, and it’s limited,” said Christophe Daligault, Chief Marketing Officer at Open Garden. “As the range between devices increases, it will be easier and easier to connect more people, but it’s going to start like this. It’s going to start as pockets of communities.”
The FireChat app is also something of an infant – at the moment it can be used to send messages and photos, but it doesn’t allow for private messages to be sent. In future, Open Garden wants to add this capability, as well as support for audio and video messages.
photo credit: natalieau via photopin cc
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