Ably, the realtime data delivery platform, has raised $1m, led by Forward Partners, to fuel its growth and accelerate the development of its technology into new areas.
Ably was born in 2013 when co-founding software engineers Matthew O’Riordan and Dr Paddy Byers saw a gap in the market to provide developers with an ‘infrastructure-as-a-service’ offering for realtime data transport. To be truly developer-friendly the service needed to be deterministically reliable and provide world-class documentation, service and support.
After three years in development, Ably launched publicly mid last year and in less than twelve months has over 2,000 developers using the platform and almost 100 customers around the world, mostly in the US. Ably’s customers range from large corporates like Yahoo!, Computer Associates and Crownbet, to scale-ups like Ballr, PeopleFun and OfferUp.
Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably, was previously co-founder of Econsultancy, sold to Centaur Media plc in 2012. In March 2016 Ashley Friedlein, Matthew’s co-founder at Econsultancy, joined Ably as an investor and adviser.
Ably’s technology powers next generation digital experiences. Ones which are live rather than static, where data is in motion rather than at rest. Use cases include live chat, realtime location tracking, live document collaboration, gaming and elearning. One customer even uses Ably for their air traffic control system for drones.
The investment will be used to bolster Ably’s engineering team to meet customer growth and accelerate development. This includes not only Ably’s unique existing realtime platform but also an exciting roadmap with pioneering new features like ‘smart notifications’ and Ably’s Exchange, which provides a universal message bus for businesses to syndicate realtime data to other businesses.
Matthew O’Riordan, Founder and CEO of Ably, comments:
“We are hugely excited to announce this funding and to be working with Forward Partners. This investment ensures we keep our global competitive tech advantage and deliver on a product roadmap that we cannot wait to make available to developers. Realtime, or live, experiences are becoming more commonplace but we see huge potential for a next generation of compelling apps and services that we help make possible”.
Luke Smith, Investor at Forward Partners comments “We’re incredibly pleased to invest in Matthew, Paddy and their talented team at Ably. We see huge potential in the business and its vision for creating game-changing realtime data services for the developer community.”
