OpenSignal lands $1.3m from Qualcomm, others for crowd-sourced mobile coverage maps

OpenSignal (formerly known as OpenSignalMaps) is today announcing that it has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Passion Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.

OpenSignal basically wants to bring transparency to mobile coverage maps by crowd-sourcing carrier signal strength worldwide via a custom Android app (with an iPhone app on the way).

Rather than forcing people to bank on coverage maps provided by the network operators themselves, OpenSignal essentially aims to open up that sort of data gathering to anyone and create proper, unbiased maps.

To date, over 2 million people have downloaded its Android app and contributed signal information to help build the coverage maps for over 200 countries across over 1,000 different networks you can currently find on its website.

And in case you were wondering: OpenSignal asserts that the data it collects and uploads to its servers is stripped of any identifying information.

Today, the company is also releasing the first version of its API, providing third-party developers with an opportunity to harness the data OpenSignal collects in their own apps and put it to good use.