Announcing $8M funding to continue building delightful APIs

Today I’m delighted to announce that we have closed an $8m round of funding from Balderton and Heavybit. This new milestone in our journey will allow us to continue on our mission to become a category leader in supporting app developers with building communication and collaboration features with our delightful APIs.

We’ve come a long way over the years. It all started in 2010, when Websockets became part of the HTML5 specification. At the time, I was working with a team of application developers who, like myself, were very excited about the prospects that it offered. Our feeling was that it was too hard to add this amazing technology without diverting precious developer time to the challenge. We developed the first version of Pusher’s product as a way of packaging this up behind an elegant API so that anyone could get the benefits.

Fast-forward eight years and both Websockets and the realtime features they power, have become the norm. We’ve been able to create a wonderful company around this technology, helping thousands of customers around the world build better applications.

We did this initially by focusing on providing developers with a simple, scalable and secure solution for their problems. But over the last couple of years we’ve been aiming our sights on bigger ambitions. We’ve grown our portfolio of products with the release of Chatkit and Beams. We feel that we can bring value and simplicity to building reliable communication and collaboration features and have several more products in the works.

To coincide with these changes, we’re also rolling out a fresh new brand that will help us grow even more. We’ve released teasers of this over the last few months, for example in our tutorials page and we hope you’ll like it as much as we do.

We also decided to rename our original product to Channels. We’ll be investing further in this area, as the product continues to go from strength to strength.

We’re incredibly grateful to our customers large and small who have supported us over the years. It’s a delight to be helping you build your apps. It’s really amazing what we’ve managed to achieve from those early days of geeking out over the HTML5 specification.

With our new funding, we’ll be taking this to new levels of scale. If you want to be part of this amazing ride, don’t forget to check out our careers page!