Who Created Instagram? Systrom, Krieger and the Full Story

Instagram was created by two Stanford graduates: American Kevin Systrom and Brazilian Mike Krieger. The app launched on the iPhone on October 6, 2010, after a first project called Burbn went nowhere. Eighteen months later, on April 9, 2012, Facebook announced it was buying Instagram for a billion dollars. Both founders left the company in September 2018. Their recipe came down to one idea: a good-looking photo, shared in seconds. If you want to grow your own account, our Instagram followers help you get past the early stage.

Who are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger?

Kevin Systrom was born on December 30, 1983 in Holliston, near Boston. He studied management science and engineering at Stanford, interned at Odeo, the startup that later gave birth to Twitter, then spent two years at Google and at Nextstop, a travel recommendation site. He loved photography and taught himself to code at night.

Mike Krieger, whose given name is Michel, was born on March 4, 1986 in São Paulo, Brazil. He moved to Stanford at 18 to study symbolic systems, a program that mixes computer science, psychology and linguistics. That’s where he met Systrom. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Meebo, an online messaging service.

The split of roles was clear from day one: Systrom carried the product vision and became CEO, Krieger built the tech and became CTO. In this video, Krieger explains the thinking that led to the app:

How did Burbn become Instagram?

The story starts with a failure. In 2009, Systrom coded Burbn in his spare time, an app to check in where you were, earn points for going out with friends and share photos. In March 2010 he raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, quit his job and asked Krieger to join him.

The problem: Burbn looked too much like Foursquare, which was hot at the time, and it was too complicated. Watching how people used it, the founders noticed that only one feature really worked: photo sharing. They cut everything else and rebuilt from scratch in a few weeks.

The new product was called Instagram, a blend of “instant camera” and “telegram”. Photos were square, a nod to the Polaroid, and filters made pictures taken with the weak cameras of early iPhones look good. The first filter, X-Pro II, was made by Systrom during a vacation in Mexico.

The first photos went up on July 16, 2010: Krieger posted a view of South Beach Harbor in San Francisco, and Systrom a dog snapped next to a taco stand in Mexico.

How did Instagram take off so fast?

Instagram hit the App Store on October 6, 2010, iPhone only. The start went beyond anything the founders had imagined. Here are the key steps:

1. On day one, about 25,000 people signed up. The servers struggled and Krieger spent the night keeping them alive.
2. In December 2010, two months after launch, the app passed one million users.
3. In January 2011, hashtags arrived to group photos by topic.
4. In February 2011, Instagram raised $7 million, with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey among the investors.
5. After one year, it had passed 10 million users.
6. On April 3, 2012, the Android version came out and topped a million downloads in less than a day.

Kevin Systrom looks back on those first months in this video, and the same idea keeps coming back: do one thing, and do it very well.

Why did Facebook buy Instagram?

On April 9, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced the purchase of Instagram for a billion dollars in cash and stock. The app had 13 employees. A few days earlier, Instagram had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation. Facebook feared a mobile rival would take over its users’ photos, and chose to pay double to bring it in-house.

The deal closed on September 6, 2012 at a lower value, around $715 million, because Facebook’s share price had dropped in the meantime. We cover what came next, from the switch to Meta to the current leadership, in our article on who owns Instagram.

Why did the founders leave?

For six years, Systrom and Krieger kept a lot of independence inside Facebook. Instagram launched Stories in 2016 and passed one billion users in June 2018. But the relationship with the parent company grew tense, especially when Facebook cut back how much it promoted Instagram inside its own apps.

On September 24, 2018, the two founders announced they were leaving, saying they wanted to “explore our curiosity and creativity again”. Adam Mosseri, a Facebook executive, took over Instagram on October 1, 2018. To me, that was the end of an era: Instagram stopped being a photo app and became a pillar of Meta.

What are the founders doing in 2026?

The duo teamed up once more. On January 31, 2023, Systrom and Krieger launched Artifact, a news app personalized by artificial intelligence. It never found its audience: they announced its shutdown in January 2024, and Yahoo took over the technology the same year.

After that, they went separate ways. Mike Krieger joined Anthropic, the company behind the Claude assistant, as chief product officer on May 15, 2024. In January 2026 he moved to the Labs team, which handles experimental projects. Kevin Systrom invests in startups and speaks regularly about building products.

As for Instagram, it announced 3 billion monthly users on September 24, 2025. Adam Mosseri is still in charge.

What can their story teach you for your account?

Instagram’s story is above all a story of simplifying. It offers very concrete pointers for posting in 2026:

1. Keep one promise. Burbn did everything and nobody cared. Instagram did one thing. Your account works better with a theme people get in three seconds.
2. Care about the look. Filters made the app a hit because they made every photo presentable. Pick a consistent style and stick with it.
3. Use hashtags the 2011 way: few and precise, to reach a community already looking for that topic.
4. Take care of the first hour. Early signals matter to the algorithm. A few Instagram likes right after posting help a post reach beyond your circle.
5. Start conversations. Ask a question in your caption and reply to every answer. Instagram comments on your Reels show new visitors that your community is alive.

To see how those signals are read today, our guide on how Instagram works breaks down the app’s three algorithms.