LinkSure Network

Most of the world's biggest apps are famous. LinkSure Network built one that wasn't. WiFi Master Key - now simply WiFi Master, living at the premium address wifi.com - grew to roughly 800 million monthly users while staying nearly invisible to Western tech press. Its pitch was almost embarrassingly simple: you want to get online, you don't have the password, and someone nearby already does.

Founded in 2013 in Shanghai by serial entrepreneur Chen Danian, LinkSure turned that everyday friction into a global utility. The app maintains a crowdsourced database of Wi-Fi credentials that users voluntarily contribute when they connect. Open the app, and it surfaces nearby hotspots you can join without hunting for a password. The company is careful to call this "sharing," not hacking - a distinction that has been both its defining feature and its most-scrutinized one.

By 2016 it was, by user count, the largest Wi-Fi sharing app on Earth: around 900 million total users and 520 million monthly actives, available in 19 languages across 223 countries. For a stretch, it sat in the same conversation as WeChat and Alipay - each with roughly a billion users - as one of China's most-used pieces of software.

LinkSure sits at the intersection of consumer mobile internet and network security. Its expertise is threefold: operating a crowdsourced network at planetary scale, applying machine learning and big data to score and defend that network, and localizing a single product across dozens of languages and markets.

That combination places it in a specific slot - not a carrier, not a super-app, but the connectivity utility people reach for when they simply need to get online. The company has floated ambitions well beyond that lane, including a proposed 272-satellite constellation aimed at reaching users past terrestrial coverage. Whether or not that materializes, it signals the through-line of everything LinkSure builds: access, extended as far as it will go.

Before LinkSure, Chen Danian helped build Shanda, one of China's gaming powerhouses. He could have stopped there. Instead he started over with a decidedly less glamorous problem: getting strangers online for free. In 2017, Fortune named him to its list of the Top 50 Most Influential Business Leaders in China. In late 2018, former Shanda executive Wang Jingying stepped in as CEO to run day-to-day operations.

The founding conviction never wavered: that connectivity should be treated closer to a right than a luxury. It is a belief the company built its entire product around.