The founders and CEO of Endaga, a company that brings rural villages online with cellular network boxes, announced this weekend they would be joining Facebook and winding down their business operations.
CEO Lance Condray and co-founders Kashif Ali, Kurtis Heimerl and Shaddi Hasan wrote in a blog post that they wanted to join Facebook in its effort to connect every person to the Internet. However they will be joining the general Facebook engineering team and not specifically working on Internet.org, Facebook’s initiative to connect the two-thirds of the global population that does not have Internet access.
“We founded Endaga to bring this vision of community cellular networks to everyone who still lacks access to network connectivity worldwide,” the Endaga team wrote. “Over the past year, our team has worked hard to empower communities in this way, and we believe Facebook’s mission to connect the world aligns perfectly with this vision.”
The Endaga team declined to comment on what they would be working on at Facebook or what would happen to their existing customers.
Endaga launched out of University of California at Berkeley’s Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions research group. The group built a mobile telecommunications network that can run out of a small box attached to a tree in a remote village.
The news of the Endaga founders’ move comes after Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook will be partnering with Eutelsat to provide Internet access to sub-Saharan Africa.
