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Communications - Friday, March 30, 2007

United Villages: Bus-powered Net Connectivity With Solar Powered PCs To Rural Tribes Raises $2M

The poor are really hot right now. Yesterday Sequoia invested in a micro-financing company that targets the poor. Today, United Villages, a Cambridge, MA startup that sells wireless network services to isolated rural villages, has raised $2M in Series A, says PEHub from a regulatory filing. The round's investors are Omidyar Network, Cambridge Light & Power Corp. and Gray Matters Capital Foundation.

United Villages distributes pre-paid cards to locals in remote villages who can write emails or record phone messages at solar powered computer kiosks installed in schools and community halls. United Villages deploys buses tricked out with short-range Wi-Fi antennas which pass through villages, automatically picking up stored emails and voice messages as they go. Once a bus reaches a city with Internet connectivity, it relays the emails and messages to their appointed destinations via the web.

Apparently the company has operations in Rural areas of Costa Rica, Rwanda, India, Cambodia and Paraguay.

United Villages has received an extraordinary amount of press coverage and former Xerox Park-man John Sealey Brown joined the advisory board.
The plan

In addition to buses, Villages also uses vehicles like this Honda motorcycle to pick up Internet dumps.

Or Donkey-powered. The company got its start thanks to a $50K prize from an MIT contest.

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