3 min readUpdated Jul 3, 2020

Ably secures $7M funding to set a new standard in realtime messaging

I’m thrilled to announce that Ably has closed a $7M Series A funding round led by MMC Ventures, with our seed funders Forward Partners co-investing. This funding enables us to deliver on our mission to provide the new standard of realtime messaging infrastructure at the edge required for a connected future.

Consumers today, more so than ever, expect their digital experiences to be realtime, yet as you know it can be incredibly difficult to deliver that. Ably solves this problem by providing simple APIs that developers can depend on, so that they can get on with building their apps and services.

This funding comes as a result of huge milestones for Ably:

  • We’ve streamed 1.5 trillion realtime messages over the Ably network
  • 100 billion realtime messages now streamed to 50 million end-users each month
  • 150% year-on-year growth since 2017
  • Some of the largest companies in the world depend on Ably to deliver mission-critical realtime experiences around the world

We’re using this funding to scale our team - we’ve already quadrupled in size since 2019 - so that we can focus on three things:

The Ably team November 2019 with some of our first new hires in our new Shoreditch office

Ably has come a long way since 2016 when myself and Paddy Byers, Ably’s CTO, were unable to find a realtime solution that provided adequate guarantees for performance without compromising on data integrity or reliability. We launched Ably in 2016 after three years of intense research and development, investing over 50,000 hours into building the foundation of Ably’s complete realtime edge messaging platform.

Our focus from day one was architecting the Ably platform around Four Pillars of Dependability:

  • Performance
  • Integrity (of data)
  • Reliability
  • High availability

Today, Ably is still the only realtime messaging platform that is able to operate within strict, dependable, transparent boundaries, at any scale. It’s why we’re honoured to see so many engineers from tech startups to large enterprises, across numerous industries such as SaaS, mobility, sport, eCommerce and eLearning, to name a few, trust us for their mission-critical realtime needs.

Everyone at Ably is incredibly grateful for all of our customers who’ve supported us and we feel privileged to work with you, especially those that have trusted us as we've grown.

If you want to be part of Ably’s next stage and empower developers everywhere to build next-generation experiences, check out our careers page :).

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