Stephen Stokols, CEO of FreedomPop recently interviewed with Fierce Wireless stating that the company plans to wrap up talks for a merger or acquisition (M&A) in the next 4-6 weeks. Talks about a possible merger or acquisition have been rumored now for quite some time.
In preparation, FreedomPop has aligned itself with The Raine Group to handle the M&A process. The Raine Group is a global merchant bank that also advises Sprints parent company, SoftBank. Putting these two things together and based on previous rumors, one could speculate that FreedomPop is indeed in talks to be acquired by Sprint. At the same time the company reports that it has also been talking with venture capitalists about a major round of funding should plans for the M&A change.
Stokols has also announced that his company continues to grow at a pretty good clip, with expectation of passing 1 million subscribers in the third quarter of 2015. Revenues continue to grow at a double digit pace month over month.
Even with all the uncertainty going on, Stokols has also said he is still on track to have the company launch overseas in a large unnamed European Market sometime in the second quarter.
FreedomPop Adds "Premium Voice" a Cellular and VoIP Switching Mechanism
For those of you who don't already know, FreedomPop offers a variety of plans ranging from completely free to $20 per month for unlimited talk, text and data with the first 1 GB being LTE before being reduced to 3G speeds. Calls and text are placed either over wi-fi or Sprint's data network using the FreedomPop app.
Today, however, taking a page out of Republic Wireless's book, the company will now allow seamless switching between VoIP and Sprints cellular voice network in order to place calls. This should be helpful to those of you out there who have had issues with call quality, as now, when your data or wi-fi connection is too slow, a simultaneous connection will be made over Sprints voice network allowing the VoIP connection to be dropped.
Those on the $20 plan will get this new feature free of charge, however if you are on the free plan you will be required to pay $2.99/month to use "Premium Voice". Those on the free plan however, will at least get one month to try the feature out free of charge.