London realtime API company Pusher raises $8m in round led by Balderton Capital

Pusher, the realtime API company that helps developers add communication and collaboration features to their apps, has announced a Series A investment of $8m led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Heavybit.

More than 200,000 developers worldwide are using Pusher’s products and more than 40 billion messages per day are now sent using APIs provided by the company, connecting more than eight billion devices per month.

Based in London, Pusher currently employs 60 people. By the end of 2018 the company aims 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.

Max Williams, Pusher’s co-founder, said: “Pusher came into being because as developers we ran into problems that required realtime infrastructure. We soon realised that others had the same problem.

“Application developers are such a vital part of the modern economy. We love providing APIs that allow them to do more and spend their time building amazing products.”

He added: “The majority of our customers are in the US and this investment will allow us to serve them better with an office in California, as well as helping us develop more products that will make developers’ lives easier.”

James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital, commented: “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.”

Formed in 2011, Pusher’s products are used by everyone from one-person operations to global brands. The New York Times uses Pusher for updating its realtime news feeds, Mailchimp for internal collaboration tools, Intercom for chat and DraftKings for updating its realtime leaderboards.

In November 2017, pusher released a new product in beta, Chatkit, which makes it easier for developers to build chat into their applications, is the first in a new line of products to be released in 2018 that will combine realtime APIs and specific vertical functionality to support different use cases.