As carriers drop unlimited data plans and throttle bandwidth, the need to stay under a data limit is on more people’s minds.
“The thing about web data is that no matter how bad you think it is now, it’s only going to get worse,” says Snappli co-founder Roy Tuvey. Snappli has just raised $1 million from investors including Greylock Partners, Index Ventures and early Facebook investor Klauss Hommels to combat this problem.
As of today the company’s iOS app is out of beta and available in the app store, and Tuvey says an Android version is also in the works.
While companies like Strangeloop and CloudFlare are trying to improve the speed and security of web sites and applications on the server side, Snappli is targeting the end user. The company’s service speeds up downloads and reduces data usage by routing all of your iPhone’s traffic through its own servers.
Snappli compresses data (even video) and can bundle multiple HTTP requests into one. It’s similar to what Opera’s mobile does, but it works in any browser and any app you want to use by changing the Access Point Name (APN) setting in iOS, effectively serving as a proxy server. Snappli also provides data usage monitoring, including detailed breakdowns of which sites and apps are using the most data so that you can adjust your usage accordingly. To top it all off, it can also filter potentially harmful sites.
Security filtering is actually how Tuvey and his brother Eldar got started. They founded ScanSafe, a web service that protected users from viruses and malware by screening their desktop web traffic by routing it through a proxy server. The company sold to Cisco in 2009 for $183 million. The Tuvey brothers and the rest of the team joined Cisco for a while, but soon got the itch to start something new.