Event Information:
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Thu26Sep2013
Real Time App Development Platform PubNub Snags $11M to Expand Sales and
PubNub wants to knock down the barriers to real-time app development. To further its goal, the company, which offers a real time app development platform through an API, closed $11 million in Series B funding last week.
If you are still not sure what a real time app is, think instant messaging, multiplayer games (where you need to see the other players’ locations), document sharing and enterprise collaboration. All these apps involve two-way live communication and synchronization.
The problem is that companies who offer real times apps, like Skype or Google Docs, typically invest a lot of money into developing core infrastructures to support and deploy those apps across a global audience. Small businesses don’t necessarily have the funds to do that.
That’s where PubNub steps in. The San Francisco firm offers a cloud platform with all the ready-made building blocks (data push, presence, storage and playback, analytics and security) for real time app development along with a globally distributed network of 11 data centers. By removing the complexity and cost out from creating real-time apps, PubNub hopes it will allow more developers to take risks and try new concepts.
So far, the idea seems to be working. PubNub, which was founded in 2010, says it now streams three million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month. It has powered real-time apps for the Olympics, Eurocup, Super Bowl, Grammys and American Music Awards (AMAs) that sync millions of devices simultaneously for real time voting, sentiment analysis, second screen ad sync and more.
The founding round was led by Scale Venture Partners along with Relay Ventures and TiE Angels. As part of the investment, Andy Vitus from ScaleVPI will join PubNub’s board of directors. PubNub says it plans to use the money to expand worldwide sales and marketing to increase demand for its product.
