Last month, I wrote about Y Combinator-backed Firebase and its ambitious vision to reinvent the infrastructure of real-time apps. Now the company is announcing that some big investors have signed on to that vision, with a $1.1 million round led by Flybridge Capital Partners.
Other investors in the round include Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Data Collective, Founder Collective, Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah, early Facebook engineers Brian Shire and Lucas Nealan, former LinkedIn VP Adam Nash, and XDegrees founder Michael Tanne. Combined with an unannounced round last year (from YC/Start Fund/SV Angel, Ken Thom, and Inspovation Ventures), the company has now raised $1.4 million.
Firebase started out as Envolve, a real-time chat service. Towards the end of its time at YC last summer, the team decided to pursue what it saw as a bigger opportunity — building the infrastructure for any developer wanting to create real-time web apps (and eventually mobile apps too). Co-founder James Tamplin says that with Firebase, developers can focus on design and front-end coding, without worrying about the backend.
In the month after announcing its beta test, Firebase says it has seen 7,000 developer signups. Its next big priority: security and permission features.
Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Developers add the Firebase library to their apps to get access to a shared data structure; any changes they make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds. Firebase apps can be written entirely with client-side code, update in real-time out-of-the-box, interoperate well with existing services, scale automatically, and provide strong data security.
Flybridge Capital Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm whose mission is to assist entrepreneurs in growing innovative, global companies. With $560 million under management, the firm is focused on investing in consumer, energy, healthcare and information technology markets and is led by a team with domain expertise and more than half a century of combined experience in venture capital. Funds include Flybridge Capital Partners III, L.P. (2008), Flybridge Capital Partners II, L.P. (2005), and Flybridge Capital Partners I, L.P....
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a leading venture capital firm, consistently ranking among the top firms in portfolio IPOs each year, with more liquidity events than any other venture capital firm. Since its founding, the firm has backed more than 170 companies that have gone public and invested in more than 290 companies that have been successfully merged or acquired. For more than 30 years, NEA has been helping to build great companies. Our committed capital has grown to...
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