- Stream — the creator of enterprise-grade activity feeds and chat APIs — announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by GGV Capital
Stream — the creator of enterprise-grade activity feeds and chat APIs — announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by GGV Capital with participation from new investor 01 Advisors, Knight, Arthur Ventures, and other backers, including Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog) and Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub). And Tiffany Luck from GGV Capital will join the Stream board of directors in connection with the funding. Stream.io is planning to invest heavily in scaling its global team across engineering, sales, and marketing.
What else does Stream do? Stream is also known for providing APIs, which enable product teams to build chat and activity feeds for their applications at scale in a fraction of the time and cost of developing in-house. And it allows product teams to focus their vital development resources on what makes their app unique. Stream powers the experiences for over a billion users across their two products and is on a mission to elevate the quality of apps for users worldwide.
With these trying times, Stream has been helping companies in segments like healthcare, education, finance, fitness, dating and social to connect their community. And the APIs are designed for scalability and several of the largest websites and apps use Stream. Some of the company’s customers include Healthline, Powerschool, Stocktwits, Freeletics, Match, TaskRabbit, Imgur, and Dubsmash.
Companies typically have been having to build feeds and chat in-house. And with applications growing faster than ever before, and users expecting a seamless UX, building in-house is becoming less feasible. And Stream also offers a level of performance and quality that companies used to spend years on with an internal team. Just like we saw immense capacity improvements with the shift from traditional data centers to the cloud, Stream enables organizations to move to a higher abstraction level when building apps.
Stream was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. And the company participated in the Techstars NYC program.
Following the program, Stream moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado. And now it employs 55 people in Amsterdam and Boulder, as well as remote.
KEY QUOTES:
“Stream’s APIs for chat and activity feeds enables product teams to build a polished user experience. Our customers launch faster and can iterate more often than teams that build in-house.”
– Thierry Schellenbach, co-founder and CEO
“Bunch is all about playing your favorite games with friends anytime – anywhere. But to bring people back together with friends, we needed a reliable real-time text chat solution. The integration process was straightforward, quick, and simple, and we felt supported by the team at Stream every step of the way. We like that Stream Chat offers a lot of what we need from a chat solution out of the box while functioning as a robust and scalable solution.”
– Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch.live
“With the proliferation of applications, in-app engagement has never been more important to user experience. Stream is empowering teams to incorporate chat and activity feeds quickly, scalably, and reliably. At GGV we’re very excited to partner with the incredible team at Stream as they go after this massive global opportunity, fueling the next $1 trillion software wave.”
– Tiffany Luck of GGV Capital
“The messaging as a service market is massive and growing. Stream’s technology advantage, the fantastic customer success capability the team has built, and Thierry’s vision for the future all make this an exciting investment and partnership.”
– Dick Costolo
