Flotype, a startup that offers a suite of technologies that simplify real-time messaging for cloud and mobile applications, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator.
Flotype, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class, is announcing that its first product is Bridge, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge is essentially an API that developers can use to avoid the complexity of building real-time messaging into their applications, and help push more data faster between servers, web browsers, mobile phones and other devices.
Founder and CEO Darshan Shankar explains to me that as he and his co-founders were studying engineering at UC Berkeley, they realized that the infrastructure behind real-time communications platforms like Facebook and Twitter needed to be democratized.
For companies that want to build complex real-time applications, Flotype provides a simple API that can be deployed within minutes by developers to enable these communications. As Shankar explains, these developers don’t need to spend millions (or billions) of dollars on building this infrastructure in-house, and can get to market faster.
For example, developers can build massive multiplayer video games like World of Warcraft for smartphones, or create the communications architecture behind a large-scale social data platform. While Shankar declined to tell us how much the use of the API costs, companies can test out the technology for free.
Already, a number of large companies (which are not being disclosed) are using Flotype Bridge middleware. The new funding will be used for further development of additional products and services that support cloud and mobile architecture.
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