It Began as a Completely Different App
Instagram was not supposed to be Instagram. It began in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app built by Kevin Systrom and the Brazilian software engineer Mike Krieger.
In March 2010, Systrom closed a $500,000 seed funding round with Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while still working on Burbn. Then came the uncomfortable realisation: the app was too similar to Foursquare. So they looked at what users actually did with it, saw that photo sharing had become the popular feature, and rebuilt around that.
The new name was a portmanteau of instant camera and telegram. The first Instagram post was a photo of South Beach Harbor at Pier 38, posted by Mike Krieger at 5:26 p.m. on 16 July 2010. The iOS app reached the App Store on 6 October that year.
A Million Users in Two Months
Growth came almost immediately. Instagram reached one million registered users in two months, ten million within a year, and one billion by June 2018.
Money followed. In February 2011 it raised $7 million in Series A funding from investors including Benchmark Capital, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca and Adam D'Angelo, valuing the company at around $20 million. By April 2012 a further $50 million round valued it at $500 million.
The app spread across platforms steadily: Android in April 2012, where it was downloaded more than a million times in under a day, a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, a Fire OS app in 2014, a Windows 10 app in 2016, and an iPadOS app as late as September 2025. It now supports 33 languages.
The Billion-Dollar Buy
On 9 April 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for approximately one billion dollars in cash and stock, with a stated plan to keep the company independently managed. The purchase came only days after that $500 million valuation.
Regulators took a look and let it through. Britain's Office of Fair Trading approved the deal on 14 August 2012, and the US Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation on 22 August, allowing it to proceed. The deal officially closed on 6 September 2012.
One investor's timing stands out. Joshua Kushner was the second largest investor in Instagram's Series B round, which led his firm Thrive Capital to double its money when the sale to Facebook went through. Instagram is now owned by Meta Platforms.
Squares, Stories and the Backlash
Instagram's original signature was a limitation. Content could only be framed in a square aspect ratio of 640 pixels, chosen to match the display width of the iPhone at the time. That restriction was eased in 2015 with an increase to 1080 pixels.
Other features piled on: messaging, multiple images or videos in a single post, filters, hashtags, and geotagging to attach a location. Stories, a sequential feed where each post lasts 24 hours, arrived as an answer to its main competitor Snapchat. By January 2019 Stories was used by 500 million people every day.
The platform is admired for its reach and criticised just as loudly. The main charges are its effect on teenagers' mental health, its repeated policy and interface changes, alleged censorship, and illegal or inappropriate content uploaded by users.
