Hola (VPN)

Hola

Type	VPN
Industry	Internet
Founded	2008
Founder	Ofer Vilenski Derry Shribman
Headquarters	Israel
Number of locations	Worldwide
Services	Unrestricted Internet Access
Website	www.hola.org

Hola is a freemium web and mobile application which claims to provide a faster, private and more secure Internet. It provides a form of virtual private network services to its users through a peer-to-peer network. It also uses peer-to-peer caching. When a user accesses certain domains that are known to use , the Hola application redirects the request to go through the computers and Internet connections of other users in non-blocked areas, thereby circumventing the blocking. This also means that other users might access the Internet through one's own computer, and that part of one's upload bandwidth might be used for serving cached data to other users. Paying users can choose to redirect all requests to peers but are themselves never used as peers.

In 1998, Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman founded KRFTech, a software development tools company. With the profits from the company, they started Jungo in 2000 to develop an operating system for home gateways. In 2006 NDS (Cisco) acquired Jungo for $107 million.

In 2008, Vilenski and Shribman started investigating the idea of re-inventing HTTP by building a peer-to-peer overlay network that would employ peer-to-peer caching to accelerate content distribution and peer-to-peer routing to make the effective bandwidth to target sites much faster. This would make the Internet faster for users and cheaper to operate for content distributors. They started up Hola with $18 million from investors such as DFJ (Skype, Hotmail), Horizons Ventures (Mr. Li Ka-Shing's fund),Magma Venture Partners (Waze), Israel's Chief Scientist Fund, and others.