Summary
Investment fund analysis of Helium’s 2025 growth, focused on revenue, subscriber growth, and carrier offload data volumes. Useful for the network-level financial picture, especially the carrier offload economics that underlie the HIP-143 pricing authority question.
Key Points
- Annualized revenue (2025): $18.3 million, propelled by the shift to burning 100% of revenue for Data Credits.
- Carrier offload volume (Q3 2025): Over 5,451 TB of mobile data offloaded from major U.S. carriers — more than doubled quarter-over-quarter.
- Carrier offload volume (Q4 2025): 4,388 TB from major U.S. carriers (60.7% increase from Q3’s 2,731 TB). (Note: Q3 and Q4 figures differ between sources — may reflect different measurement periods or corrections.)
- Cumulative paid mobile data since inception (end Q3): Over 8,505 TB.
- Carrier partners: T-Mobile, AT&T, Movistar, Google Orion, Wefi.
- Helium Mobile subscriber accounts (end Q3 2025): Over 461,500 (48% QoQ increase).
- Helium Mobile subscribers (mid-November 2025): Over 541,000.
- Daily active users (Q3): 1.2 million (35% increase QoQ); peaked near 2 million mid-November.
- Carrier offload as primary revenue (February 2026): Helium Mobile maintained $2.2 million in revenue for the second consecutive month, with carrier offload fees as primary source.
- Data Credit burns: Increased ~200% QoQ during Q3 2025.
Newsletter Angles
- The $18.3M annualized revenue is real progress — but it still needs to be set against the network’s cumulative operator investment to understand the equity split. Who captures the $18.3M? Nova Labs negotiates the carrier contracts (per HIP-143); hotspot operators get the $0.50/GB pass-through, subject to rewardable data caps (HIP-82).
- The carrier partner list (T-Mobile, AT&T, Movistar, Google Orion, Wefi) represents the entire commercial relationship of the network — all of it negotiated by Nova Labs without governance. The operators who built the coverage don’t know the terms.
Entities Mentioned
- Helium Network — network-level financials
- Nova Labs — commercial counterparty to all carrier deals; not explicitly named in all source passages but implied
- T-Mobile — carrier partner
- AT&T — carrier partner (partnership announced April 2025)
Concepts Mentioned
- DePIN — revenue mechanics
- Tokenomics — Data Credit burn mechanism; carrier payments → HNT burned → distributed as operator rewards
Notes
Sarson Funds is an investment fund with a long crypto position — framing is bullish. Revenue and subscriber figures are likely accurate (cited from Messari quarterly reports as upstream source) but the framing omits operator-level economics. The $18.3M network revenue doesn’t tell you what the average hotspot operator earns from it; that requires the $0.50/GB rate divided across all qualifying hotspots.