Ably's story & milestones
Matthew O'Riordan, CEO & Co-founder
"When we launched Ably in 2016, we had a clear vision that realtime interactions would underpin rather than just augment our everyday digital experiences. We made technology decisions to provide a global edge network engineered for efficiency, reliability and ease of use."
When Ably launched in 2016 its founders, Matthew O'Riordan (CEO) and Paddy Byers (CTO), had a clear vision: that realtime interactions would underpin rather than just augment our everyday digital experiences. As more devices and services join the internet, and businesses scramble to reorganize themselves around a complicated realtime economy, the need for simpler and more reliable realtime infrastructure only intensifies. Organizations need infrastructure to meet not only today’s data-streaming needs but also those for a future where everyday services rely on data that is constantly in motion.
But before 2016 there was no realtime infrastructure available that provided adequate guarantees for performance at scale without compromising on data integrity or service reliability. And at the same time, most organizations don’t have the in-house capabilities nor the time to do this efficiently at scale.
This was the hard engineering problem Ably's founders set out to solve. When Ably launchd launched in 2016, they'd invested more than 50,000 hours into intense research and development, architecting and engineering the foundations of Ably's globally-distributed infrastructure and platform around four pillars of dependability.
Today, Ably is still the only platform for realtime data synchronization that is able to operate within strict, dependable, transparent boundaries - at any scale. We power digital experiences in realtime for more than 250 million devices across 80 countries each month.
Ably is now laser focused on solving the next-level realtime problems of data synchronization at scale for digital experiences.
Ably milestones at a glance
January 2016: Ably launches after 50,000 hours intense research and development
September 2016: 1,000 developers are using Ably
January 2017: Ably supports 1.5 million concurrent connections for the first time
May 2017: Ably secures $1M in Seed funding from Forward Partners - over 100 billon realtime messages have been delivered over Ably
January 2019: 5,000 developers now stream two billion daily messages to 30 million devices over Ably
April 2020: Ably secures $7M Series A funding from MMC and Forward Partners - there's now 7,500 developers streaming 100 billion messages to 50 million devices each month
June 2021: Ably Secures $70M Series B funding from co-lead investors Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLC - there's now 11,500 developers streaming 550 billion messages to 250 milion devices each month
Ably milestones in detail
January 2016: Ably launches after 50,000 hours intense research and development
August 2016: Ably is now interopable between multiple protocols
September 2016: 1,000 developers are using Ably
December 2016: Ably launches its first integrations for scalable and resilient device to server data streams, allowing organziations to extend Ably to their event-driven architectures
January 2017: Ably powers 1.5 million concurrent connections for the first time
March 2017: Ably launches a unified API for cross-platform push notifications
May 2017: Ably secures $1M in Seed funding from Forward Partners - over 100 billon realtime messages have been delivered over Ably
November 2017: Ably expands its integrations with support for serverless functions
April 2018: Ably now supports the MQTT protocol
January 2019: 5,000 developers now stream two billion daily messages to 30 million devices over Ably
June 2019: Ably now supports the Server-Sent Events (SSE) protocol
March 2020: Ably expands its integrations to include Zapier and Cloudflare Workers
April 2020: Ably secures $7M Series A funding from MMC and Forward Partners - there's now 7,500 developers streaming 100 billion messages to 50 million devices each month
September 2020: Ably launches the Ably Hub to help individuals and companies share their data data streams
November 2020: Ably wins the Best API Debut award at the API World conference and expo and two 2020 Devportal Awards for Best API Business Model and Best New DX Innovation
November 2020: Ably partners with AWS Marketplace
April 2021: Ably launches Ably Asset Tracking to make it easier to build delivery apps and logistics services that rely on realtime location data to track any asset
June 2021: Ably Secures $70M Series B funding from co-lead investors Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLC - there's now 11,500 developers streaming 550 billion messages to 250 million devices each month