About Ably: The realtime platform that just works

Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform. We power more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform, serving over 2 billion devices monthly. Businesses like HubSpot, NASCAR and Webflow trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.

Ably’s products place composable realtime in the hands of developers. Simple APIs and SDKs for every tech stack, enable the creation of a host of live experiences - including chat, collaboration, notifications, broadcast and fan engagement. All powered by our scalable infrastructure.

When Ably launched in 2016, founders Matthew O'Riordan (CEO) and Paddy Byers (CTO) designed on one core belief: that realtime wouldn't be a feature - it would be the foundation of modern digital experiences. That's now playing out. As more devices come online and AI-driven products depend on instant, stateful interactions, the pressure on realtime systems keeps growing. Organizations need infrastructure to meet not only today’s data-streaming needs, but also those for a future where AI agents, collaborative applications, and 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 launched, 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.

Ably remains the only realtime platform designed to operate within strict, transparent guarantees at any scale. We power digital experiences in realtime for more than 2 billion devices across 80 countries each month, delivering 6.5ms message delivery latency and 100% uptime for five years and counting.

Ably's platform - proven under the load of billions of devices - is now being applied to agentic AI and copilots. The same infrastructure that has delivered record-low latency and five years of uninterrupted uptime now provides the AI Transport layer these systems need to operate reliably in realtime. With mature, battle-tested guarantees, Ably brings dependable, low-latency state synchronisation to AI workloads that must act, coordinate, and collaborate instantly at massive scale.

The Ably team is filled with experienced leaders and passionate individual contributors. Between our founders alone, we have over 25 years dedicated to solving realtime problems. 

Matthew O’Riordan is the CEO and technical co-founder of Ably. Matthew has been a software engineer for over 20 years, many of those as a CTO. He first started working on commercial internet projects in the mid 1990s, when Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape were still battling it out. Whilst he enjoys coding, the challenges he faces as an entrepreneur starting and scaling businesses is what drives him. Matthew has previously started and successfully exited from two tech businesses.

Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn

Paddy has over 25 years experience building and leading software teams. Prior to Ably, he has led the development of realtime, embedded and mobile products and software for safety and security-critical applications. Paddy holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge as well as a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He continues to be an active developer, contributing to the ongoing expansion of Ably's technology and to open source projects.

Connect with Paddy on LinkedIn

We also benefit from the valued advice of our board, which consists of:

• Keith Wallington, Chairperson

• Teddi Wardi - Managing Director at Insight Partners

• Norman Fiore - General Partner and Co-founder at Dawn Capital

• Simon Menashy - Partner at MMC

• Luke Smith - Forward Partners
  
  

Ably has raised $78 million to date. Here’s an overview of our funding rounds:

• Seed funding, May 2017 - $1 million from Forward Partners

• Series A funding, April 2020 - $7 million from MMC and Forward Partners

• Series B funding, June 2021 - $70 million from co-lead investors Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLC

Here are some of the key milestones we have delivered since launching in 2016:

2016

• Ably is now interoperable between multiple protocols

• Ably launches its first integrations for scalable and resilient device to server data streams, allowing organizations to extend Ably to their event-driven architectures

2017

• Ably launches a unified API for cross-platform push notifications

• Ably expands its integrations with support for serverless functions

2018

• Ably now supports the MQTT protocol

2019

• Ably now supports the Server-Sent Events (SSE) protocol

2020

• Ably expands its integrations to include Zapier and Cloudflare Workers

• Ably partners with AWS Marketplace

2021

• Flutter plugin

• Control API 

2022

• Kafka Connector 

• Message interactions

2023

• Datadog integration

• Subscription filters 

• Channel Subscription with new Python Realtime SDK

• Kafka Connector 3.0 

• Spaces 

• React Hooks now part of JavaScript SDK

2024

• LiveSync Alpha

• LiveSync GA with MongoDB Connector

• LiveSync PostgreSQL Connector

• Ably Chat

• Chat SDK React support

• Chat SDK iOS (Swift) support

• Chat SDK Android (Kotlin) support

2025

• Annotations released in Ably Pub-Sub

• LiveObjects beta released

• Ably Chat SDK 1.0 released

• Message editing and deleting released for Ably Chat

• AI Moderation integrations released for Ably Chat

• UI Kit released for Ably Chat

• Ably AI Transport

Here are a few of our key statistics and proof points.

• We serve over 2 billion devices per month and over 30 billion monthly connections

• We deliver a 6.5ms global message delivery latency

• We offer a 99.999% SLA

• We have maintained 6 years of 100% uptime (no outages)

• This is all supported by our multi-region infrastructure - with 700+ points of presence and 11 globally distributed regions

We are proud to receive great feedback on G2, and to have won a series of awards, including:

Security and compliance aren't extras - they're baked into everything we do. From network level attack mitigation, to individual message-level encryption, our clients never need to worry. Specifically, we are: 

• SOC 2 Type 2 certified

• HIPAA compliant

• EU GDPR certified

• ISO 27001 compliant

• PCI compliant

Read more about our security and compliance

• Ably supports 22+ languages and platforms through our suite of SDKs.

• We integrate with your tech stack, including Datadog, Kafka, Vercel, and more.

• We partner with AWS, and are available on the AWS Marketplace. See our listing. 

• You can enjoy all of our platform capabilities free of charge. No credit card required.

Try Ably for free today

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of realtime experiences online. We’re tackling planet-scale problems here - and at the heart of our mission lies a commitment to putting developers first. If you thrive on innovation, obsess over customers and love solving hard technical challenges, we’d love to hear from you.

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