"NexGen will initially commercialise its technology to end consumers through monthly subscriptions with further opportunities to license its technology with key global industry partners."
SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 18, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Neumob, the company that speeds up your apps, announced today that it has raised a $2.3 million seed round from a top tier group of investors. Accel Partners, Eniac Ventures, Lightbank, Menlo Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Shasta Ventures and others contributed to this round. This funding will fuel Neumob's product development as the startup continues its mission to bring better, faster app performance to billions of mobile users around the world.
Neumob has developed a patent-pending mobile software and cloud network solution that accelerates app data traffic, giving consumers access to technology, such as CDN and WAN, that only large enterprises had before. By simply installing Neumob's free app, smartphone users can dramatically improve the speed of their apps and browsers. Neumob works with Wi-Fi, LTE, 4G, 3G, and all mobile data carriers, which allows just about all smartphone users to enter the "mobile fast lane."
"Mobile apps are everywhere, but a mass majority of the world experience slow laggy apps, timeout issues or worse, unusable apps," said cofounder and CEO Jeff Kim. "Neumob takes cutting edge acceleration technology and will make it readily accessible to 5 billion users around the world. We are disrupting the closed ecosystem in mobile infrastructure that has been dominated by large telcos and equipment companies and hasn't seen much innovation."
Neumob was founded by an elite team of "ex-CDN/WAN guys" who have been focused on fixing PC Internet performance for the past 20 years, with experience working at leading companies including Akamai, Cisco, and CDNetworks. They realized that while CDN and WAN technologies represent a multibillion dollar sector, no-one had applied advancements in these areas to mobile apps or made them accessible to individuals. They founded Neumob in 2014 and the first consumer product launched for Android on the Google Play store in April 2015. "The debate over native apps vs. mobile web ended a while ago, and yet everyone is still focused on technology for mobile web. We know Neumob has something that the market needs," said Jason Pressman, managing director of Shasta Ventures.
Neumob quickly attracted attention from investors, especially those with a focus on mobile technology, who were excited about the billion-dollar opportunities involved in accelerating app performance and disrupting legacy providers, like Akamai, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei and Alcatel.
"We're incredibly excited about Neumob's mobile-first mission, team and technology and see a massive market need for their services," said Rich Wong partner at Accel Partners.
Beyond speed, Neumob also empowers consumers to gain greater security and control over their smartphones. Its app includes a Traveler feature that allows users to access censored or blocked content while traveling. In addition, Neumob enables you to encrypt all data traffic that goes in and out of your mobile device and secures Wi-Fi connections anywhere you go. This prevents hackers from stealing your private information and any logging of your personal online activities. Neumob's Reporter feature lets you see which apps are using your data and reports uploads and downloads.
With this funding, Neumob will continue to develop software for its core product and fuel global user acquisition efforts. Its iOS app will be released in the next few months. Enspire Capital, Prado SV, SV Frontier, and TriplePoint Capital participated in this round, along with the investors listed above. About Neumob:
Neumob's mission is to speed up Mobile Apps for the next 5 billion users around the globe. Our team has spent the past 20 years building cloud networks for businesses, content providers, governments and Internet operators. Neumob was formed to empower Consumers with the latest technologies to provide Speed, Security and Control.
Our app, Neumob Accelerator, routes all of our users' traffic through our acceleration network delivering requests faster and reducing the penalty for using slower connections like 3G and 4G. The map above is a breakdown of the speed boost delivered by country. Users in every country we currently serve have faster apps, but those in emerging mobile markets (e.g. Nigeria and Brazil) see huge improvements.
Review
The Neumob app also works with Wi-Fi connections, according to the company. It essentially makes use of WAN (wide area networking) acceleration, similar to what content distribution networks (CDNs) such as Akamai and Limelight Networks already offer on a larger scale.
Unlike better-known rivals, however, Neumob is aimed at the consumer instead of content providers with deep pockets to optimise the delivery of their content.
One such consumer-friendly feature is the ability to unlock content across geographical boundaries. By connecting to its various POPs across the world, it could potentially let users access sites that would have been blocked otherwise.
For example, a user can use the app to access blocked websites such as Facebook or Google Maps while he is in China. Similarly, a user outside of China may be able to access, say, video services that are otherwise available only in the country.
Clearly, the app still needs work, as we had some issues connecting to a Neumob server at times. Also, we could not connect to some apps such as China’s LeTV when the app is set to point to a China server.
The other question is whether your data is safe travelling through Neumob’s servers. According to the company, it keeps only anonymised data and values users’ privacy seriously.
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