Portfolio

Pusher raises $8M to grow its platform of realtime APIs for developers, led by Balderton

BY BALDERTON

Pusher, the developer tools company that makes realtime APIs powering communication and collaboration apps, is today announcing $8M in Series A funding led by Balderton, with participation from San Francisco-based Heavybit.

Pusher is at the forefront of the PaaS revolution that focuses on developers as customers. Over 200,000 developers worldwide, from one-person operations to companies such as the Financial Times (FT), Mailchimp, Intercom and Draft Kings, are using Pusher's APIs today for in-app notifications, activity streams, chat, dashboards, collaboration features and much more.

Max Williams, Pusher’s founder and CEO

The company was founded by Max Williams, who saw early on that providing developers the tools they need to build the realtime experiences that customers are demanding was an urgent and compelling opportunity. And it wasn't a simple demand to address — the maintenance of reliable and scalable real-time infrastructure demanded by high-profile brands was proving the be a fundamental challenge for realtime web experiences.

Pusher came into being because as developers we ran into problems that required realtime infrastructure. We soon realised that others had the same problem.

Max Williams, Pusher’s founder and CEO

Pusher is not Max's first startup. He also co-founded New Bamboo (acquired by Thoughtbot), and Pandastream (acquired by Workday via Mediacore).  We've seen that Max loves taking an experimental approach to building products and organisations, and his team's focus on working smartly within constraints has allowed Pusher to punch way above its weight and compete with larger companies.

Under Max’s leadership, Pusher has grown to over 60 people based in London. By the end of 2018 the company hopes to have up to 30 people working in a new US office. The US team, which will be made up of sales, marketing and customer support staff, will initially be based in the offices of investor Heavybit.

See the Pusher team's Career pages.

The company's stats to date are really exceptional:

  • 200k developers are using Pusher worldwide today
  • 40+billion msg per day
  • 3,200 paying customers
  • Pusher saw a 5x increase in usage in 2017
  • Connected to 8 billion devices per month (as of December 2017)
We love that they have been growing organically for a long time by building a hugely admired, developer-focused culture.

James Wise, Balderton

Read James' thoughts behind the investment on his Medium here.

James Wise, the Balderton Partner who led the investment, said: “The web was built to be mostly asynchronous, but Pusher’s infrastructure and their unique platform allows the company to rapidly roll out new products to bring realtime features to everyone. We love that they have been growing organically for a long time by building a hugely admired developer-focused culture, and we hope with this capital they’ll be able to serve that market even better.” 

Read about the announcement in Techcrunch here, and in UKTN here.

READ MORE ARTICLES

Stay in touch with Balderton

Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on news from Balderton, and our portfolio.