digital-divide
(12)
Sally Hudson Maps the Money Beneath the Fiber
At VCTI, Sally Hudson translates the hidden arithmetic of broadband into a practical question: where should the next mile go, and what will it really cost?
Danny Gardner Put Wi-Fi Where the Wires Run Out
A student project, a solar panel and a stubborn question became Mesh++. Danny Gardner’s routers travel lightly because the places that need a signal rarely come with convenient walls, wires or outlets.
Sam Enoka Is Putting the Cloud Where the Current Already Runs
Raised in North Pole and seasoned in finance and electricity markets, the Greensparc founder has a practical wager: remote communities should host the computing their power can support.
Jim McKenna Bet Maine's Last Mile Could Travel Through the Air
A former nuclear-submarine officer built a Maine internet company around one stubborn engineering belief: fiber should carry the distance, and wireless should finish the trip.
The Maine ISP Betting a Tower Can Beat a Trench - And Reach the Roads Fiber Skips
Redzone Wireless spent years proving that rural broadband does not always need a trench. Its wager is simple: use fiber where it helps, radio where wires get expensive, and keep a Maine support desk close enough to know what an ice storm does to a back road.
The Data Center That Fits Inside a Hydro Plant
A San Francisco startup led by an Alaskan energy trader is betting that the next wave of AI compute won't be built in Virginia. It will be built next to a waterfall in Cordova.
LinkSure Network
LinkSure Network is the mobile-internet company behind WiFi Master Key (now WiFi Master, at wifi.com), a peer-to-peer app that lets people find and connect to shared Wi-Fi hotspots for free. Founded in 2013 in Shanghai by serial entrepreneur Chen Danian and later headquartered with an overseas base in Singapore, the app grew into one of the world's most-used utilities, reaching roughly 800-900 million users at its peak. LinkSure layers cloud security detection, encrypted tunnels and machine-learning risk scoring on top of the connection experience, and monetizes primarily through in-app advertising and content.
Darsel
Darsel is an education-technology nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over the messaging apps students already have. Instead of an app or a laptop, students practice curriculum-aligned questions through SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and an AI-powered chatbot delivers hints, explanations, and personalized practice while auto-grading homework and reporting progress to teachers. Founded by Stanford MBA and MIT alum Abdulhamid Haidar during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Darsel has grown from a spring-break prototype to a platform used across Jordan, India, and Nigeria, reaching hundreds of thousands of students who have answered hundreds of millions of math questions.
Nucleos
Nucleos is a San Francisco Bay Area public benefit corporation building secure e-learning software for people who are incarcerated. Its Learning Platform runs inside the locked-down IT environments of prisons and jails, stripping out the roughly 95% of digital coursework that facilities normally block for security reasons, so incarcerated learners can access GED prep, college degrees, vocational training, and wellness programs on tablets and kiosks. Founded by Noah Freedman and Camila Vega out of a Stanford education-technology project, Nucleos aims to reduce recidivism by making education - one of the most effective reentry interventions - actually usable behind bars.
Abdulhamid Haidar
Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.
Derek Ting
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Jase Wilson
Jase Wilson grew up in rural Missouri, earned a Master of City Planning from MIT, and has spent two decades trying to wire America together. After helping land Google Fiber's first network in Kansas City, founding and ultimately losing Neighborly - a civic fintech built on municipal bonds - he pivoted to Ready.net in 2019. Now, as founder and CEO, he runs a Y Combinator-backed vertical SaaS platform that helps state broadband offices manage billions in federal BEAD grants and track sub-grantee performance, with $14.6M in total funding and a team of 62.