Onavo

About Onavo

Onavo, an Israeli mobile web analytics company, was established in 2010 by co-founders Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger. Rosen, who served as CEO, and Tiger, the CTO, both served in an elite technology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. Prior to Onavo, Rosen was an analyst in the cloud computing industry and was a founding employee at two other tech firms. The duo built Onavo from the ground up, securing two rounds of funding totaling $16 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Magma Venture Partners, and Horizons Ventures.

The company initially launched consumer-facing mobile apps, such as Onavo Extend and Onavo Count, designed to help users manage and reduce their mobile data consumption through data compression technology. This was particularly relevant when limited data plans were common, and the apps promised users they could get significantly more usage out of their existing plans. The primary product, Onavo Protect, was a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service marketed as a way to keep users' data safe. This free app became immensely popular, with over 33 million downloads.

Beneath the consumer utility, Onavo's business model pivoted to data analytics. The company launched Onavo Insights, a market intelligence platform that provided analytics on mobile app usage and performance to developers and publishers. This service was powered by anonymized data collected from users of its free VPN and data-saving apps. In October 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo for an estimated $120-$200 million, turning the Tel Aviv office into Facebook's first R&D center in Israel. Facebook leveraged Onavo's powerful analytics to gain competitive intelligence on the mobile app landscape. The data collected through the Onavo Protect app provided crucial insights into the growth and usage of other applications, reportedly influencing major strategic decisions, such as the $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 and the development of features to compete with Snapchat.

Following the acquisition, Onavo's data collection practices came under intense scrutiny, with the service often being classified as spyware. In August 2018, Apple removed Onavo Protect from the App Store for violating its policies against collecting data on the usage of other apps. Amid growing privacy concerns and criticism, Facebook ultimately shut down the Onavo service entirely in 2019.