Cloud application services provider Iron.io has just closed a $1.4 million round of seed funding, led by Baseline Ventures, the same investors who led the seed rounds for Instagram, TaskRabbit, Heroku, Weebly and many others. Additional investors participating in this round are Ignition Partners, Cloud Capital Partners, Citrix Systems, Jonathan Siegel, Matt Ocko, Jared Kopf and Lance White. Steve Anderson, founder of Baseline Ventures, will join Iron.io’s Board of Directors.
Alongside the funding announcement, Iron.io also launched its IronMQ service into public beta today.
Iron.io, essentially an application infrastructure as a service provider (IaaS), makes multiple cloud application services that work across multiple platforms and clouds. One product is IronWorker (originally called SimpleWorker), a scalable task queue that allows developers to offload front-end tasks and manage their scheduled jobs and background processing. IronWorker launched in January of this year and has now executed over 10 million tasks and supports thousands of jobs per day for the company’s user base.
IronMQ, now in public beta, is a flexible message queue for orchestrating data and event flow within cloud applications and between systems. This allows different parts of an app to interface and scale independently from other internal and external processes.
The value of Iron.io’s products is the same for all these “as a service” companies – they allow developers to focus on building the application itself, not the plumbing. Today, most web application workers use open source solutions to build their own message and task queues, but with IronMQ and IronWorker, there’s not much setup or maintenance involved. The service also provides a real-time view into the systems through its online solution.
Developers can now sign up for IronMQ as a free trial. IronWorker is already available as a beta. Pricing is usage-based with free message blocks and compute hours per month.