Launch of the ios app

The Instagram app was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, and racked up 25,000 users in one day.4 At the end of the first week, Instagram had been downloaded 100,000 times, and by mid-December, the number of users had reached one million.5 The timing of the app's release ended up being fortuitous because the iPhone 4– featuring an improved camera–had launched just a few months earlier, in June 2010.6

Series A Funding

After the rapid rise in Instagram's user base, more investors became interested in the company. In February 2011, Instagram raised $7 million in a Series A funding round. One of their investors was Benchmark Capital, which valued the company at around $25 million. In addition to institutional investors, the company attracted the attention of other leading companies in the social media technology industry, including Twitter and Facebook.7

Although this new round of financing gave Systrom and Krieger the opportunity to hire more people, the founders decided to keep the company really small, with barely a dozen employees.

Systrom knew Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, from his time as an intern at Odeo. Dorsey expressed a strong interest in the company and pursued the idea of acquiring Instagram. Twitter reportedly made a formal offer of around $500 million in stock, but Systrom declined the offer.

Facebook Acquires Instagram

By March 2012, the app's user base had grown to approximately 27 million users.9 In April 2012, Instagram was released for Android phones and was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day.10 At the time, the company was also close to receiving a new round of funding at a valuation of $500 million.11 Systrom and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had become acquainted through events held at Stanford, and the two had been in communication during the beginning of Instagram's rapid rise in popularity.

In April 2012, Facebook (now Meta) made an offer to purchase Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock; a key provision was that the company would remain independently managed. Shortly thereafter and just prior to its initial public offering (IPO), Facebook moved forward and acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.12

Instagram made a limited-feature website interface available in November 2012.13 In June 2014, the company introduced an app for the Amazon Fire device, and finally, in 2016, it created an app that made it compatible with Microsoft Windows tablets and computers.

Newer Features Added to the App

Although Instagram has a variety of features, most basically, the app's interface allows individuals who have created a free account to upload media–both photos and videos. Users can then edit the media they upload with filters and organize them with location information and hashtags (a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign that is used primarily on social media platforms to identify posts about a specific topic). Users can make their profiles public or private; the difference is that with a public profile, a user's photos/videos are viewable by every other Instagram user, whereas with a private profile, users can approve who they want to be able to view their posts. Instagram users can browse other users' photos and videos by searching for hashtags and locations. They can also scroll through an aggregation of trending content and interact with other users' photos and videos by clicking on buttons that allow them to "like" a post or add a text comment to a post. When a user "follows" another user, it means that they are adding that user's photos and videos to their feed.

The first version of the Instagram app only allowed users to display their media in a square aspect ratio (an aspect ratio is a proportional relationship between an image's width and height). For a square aspect ratio, an image's height and width are the same. This meant that Instagram users could only post media that matched the 640-pixel width of the iPhone 4 at that time (in 2010). In 2015, this feature changed and users could upload media that was larger (up to 1080 pixels).18

Since it was first launched, Instagram has also added a messaging feature and the capability for users to include multiple images or videos within the same post.