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(Updated, corrected investor information)
FON, the Madrid, Spain company that offers routers to people that FON members can share if they want, has raised a second round of funding.
It has received $13M from existing investors Index Ventures and Google, and from four undisclosed non-US investors (the company says names will be announced at a later date). Its total funding is now $35 million, and comes a time when a raft of competitors have entered the market, such as Whisher, a Benchmark Capital-backed company, which targets FON directly, and other players that overlap with FON, such as Meraki.
FON says it has a total of 320,000 members and more than 120,000 WiFi hot spots that those members can access. In the US, more than 60,000 hot spots have gone up over the past two months, serving 45,000 members. Joanna Rees is chief executive of FON USA (Update: The company says Joanna is an early investor in FON too).
Here’s a post by Martin Varsavsky, the CEO and founder, announcing the funding news.
3 Comments
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Covere said:
Big bet on what it seems to be a money burning machine. We’ll see how it all turns out.
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Adam said:
“FON says it has a total of 320,000 members and more than 120,000 WiFi hot spots that those members can access.”
They must be kidding! I haven’t found more than 2 hotspots during the last 6 months and believe me I travel quite a lot, both in Europe and US.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me those figures are a bit inflated… -
Jon Gelsey said:
120K registered routers. But once you have one up you find no one else does, so why bother maintaining it?
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5:58 pm
VentureBeat » Roundup: Ads up, AOL launches mobile social platform, Starbucks changes WiFi, and more said:
[...] which probably sounds like another nail tapping into the coffin to startups like Fon, which plan on creating large networks of WiFi hotspots. Topanga high-intensity lighting funded by Khosla — Topanga Technologies is based in [...]