FreedomFi Raises $9.5 Million from Blueyard Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and SamsungNext to Build a Web 3.0 Platform for Crowd-Sourced 5G Networks

BOULDER, Colo., March 15, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- , the open 5G company, today announced that it closed a $9.5 million Series A funding round from Blueyard Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and SamsungNext. The company aims to use the funds to accelerate development of its software and forge new partnerships with telecom equipment manufacturers, operators, and other ecosystem players. “With the increasingly large swathes of spectrum becoming available to the general public under permissive licensing models, crowd-sourced cellular is ripe for becoming as disruptive to telecom as the Internet was to computing,” said Joey Padden, CTO and co-founder, FreedomFi. “We may have jump-started the crowd-sourced cellular concept by launching our own hardware, but our ultimate goal is to enable other hardware manufacturers and small cell vendors to adopt open source software powering decentralized wireless architecture.” Last year, FreedomFi partnered with the Helium blockchain and launched the worlds first consumer-deployable cellular base station, allowing retail consumers with zero knowledge of 5G technologies to bring up a cellular network node and start mining cryptocurrency rewards for operating it. Founded by open source software veterans, the company is one of the top contributors of code to which is governed by the Linux Foundation and is quickly emerging as the standard platform for crowd-sourced wireless infrastructure.