These are numbers any startup would love to post.
In its first day, Bridge signed up 1,000 developers. In the span of one week the messaging platform has delivered more than 60 million messages. It has had more than 500 server downloads.
In January, the startup previously known as Flotype, announced it had raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, InterWest, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator. Flotype was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class.
Bridge provides a secure machine-to-machine messaging environment that scales data delivery between servers, apps, iPhones, laptops and any other node you can think of these days in this cloud connected world. Bridge is built on Erlang, a language fitting for building complex distributed systems. It also use VMware technologies such as RabbitMQ underneath to power Bridge.
Today’s young companies thrive by building services and systems that do not require significant engineering resources. Bridge is well suited to them in that regard. But its golden goose is in the downloads. Bridge will build its business by charging companies on a per core basis for the downloadable server that it calls Bridge Server.
Architecting systems in this post-PC age is a complex task. To connect vast node networks, messaging system, developers need simple components that do not need knowledge of the entire system.
Startups have pretty much had to build these systems themselves. Facebook built Thrift. Google developed a system called Protocol Buffers. Evernote, Quora, LinkedIn, Twitter and a long list of well-known companies have in-house solutions in place.
The Bridge technology follows in the foot steps of middleware messaging platforms like Tibco and IBM. These legacy technologies have been tried and true in the enterprise. They are also of a different age, requiring people with specialized knowledge to keep them running and optimized.
Bridge’s deepest competition will come from the legacy giants when Bridge starts working with large enterprise operations. But there again, Bridge’s strength will come in how much it can help an organization develop a messaging service that is affordable and made for on-premise and the cloud.