PubNub provides APIs that power messaging, presence and continual real-time data streams for apps and connected devices, covering use cases from gaming and virtual events to telehealth and IoT. Its platform is used across roughly 600 million devices in more than 70 countries, with some 900,000 developer projects generating about 21 petabytes of data monthly. The company supports thousands of customers, including Adobe, Atlassian, DocuSign and RingCentral, and emphasizes global points of presence and compliance with rules such as HIPAA, GDPR and SOC 2 Type 2. PubNub says customer bookings grew 200% year‑over‑year in 2021. Management plans to use the new funding to expand platform functionality and for geographic expansion, starting with a new Asia Pacific office in Singapore. The company positions itself as a backbone for “virtual spaces,” moving beyond simple messaging toward broader real-time data services. PubNub operates a real-time Data Stream Network that sends and manages messaging traffic between companies, apps and IoT devices via some 70 SDKs. Its platform enables roughly 1.3 trillion messages per month for customers including Peloton, Atlassian, athenahealth, JustEat, Swiggy, Yelp, the Sacramento Kings and Gett. The company partners with public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and IBM Watson while running its overlay on the public cloud today. PubNub is evaluating moving into different kinds of data centers and performing cost and performance calculations, and leadership has noted potential alignment opportunities with cloud providers in the future. The company raised $23 million in a Series D to ramp up international expansion with an emphasis on emerging markets. PubNub’s CEO Todd Greene co-founded the company with Stephen Blum; the firm said the valuation for this round is a solid increase on its prior mark. PubNub runs a global data network that delivers realtime messaging for apps, IoT devices, and other low-latency services. The company says it will use new funding to sharpen its focus on Internet of Things applications and hardware, as well as clean energy and social collaboration. PubNub processes about 750 billion realtime transactions per month and reports growth in connected endpoints from 200 million to 300 million devices over a three-month period. It serves roughly 2,000 customers and partners, including Yahoo, McDonald’s and CBS, and is expanding enterprise relationships such as with Bosch. Leadership has signaled potential investment in infrastructure and private-network messaging relays, including consideration of hybrid solutions and moving beyond third-party data centers. The company is not disclosing revenues, profitability, or valuation, though the CEO described its financial picture as "rosy." PubNub provides APIs that enable publishers and developers to implement messaging and other real-time social services on apps and websites. Its services support real-time interaction for live location, multiplayer games, collaborative apps, one-to-one and one-to-many messaging, and machine-to-machine signaling, as well as live dashboards, streams, collaboration and second-screen synchronization. Clients named in the article include Rebtel, Viggle, GetTaxi, Humble Bundle, StageIT, Spreecast, Celly, Monotype and Class Dojo; its platform has powered events such as the 2012 Olympics, Eurocup 2012, the 2012 AMAs and recent Super Bowls, Grammys and Academy Awards. The company distributes traffic across 11 datacenters worldwide, powers thousands of real-time apps, streams more than 3 million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month, and says traffic has increased roughly 200-fold over the past 18 months. PubNub plans to expand its offerings in the coming weeks and positions its API approach as a cost-effective alternative to building standalone real-time services. It faces competition from services such as Firebase, Pusher, Twilio and Layer. PubNub delivers real-time messaging and notification infrastructure so developers can add robust messaging without rebuilding backend systems. Its initial product, PubNub Galaxy, is designed for one-to-many push messaging at large scale. The company recently launched PubNub Pulse to enable low-latency, persistent one-to-one connections that can deliver messages in under 50 milliseconds. Early Pulse customers include MyPCBackup.com, Dice with Buddies, CometChat, and a large VOIP company using it as a SIP replacement. PubNub has grown from about 1,000 active customers in March to more than 1,500 and scaled traffic from a peak of ~100,000 messages per second to about 1 million messages per second. The company has 14 employees and recently closed a financing round, indicating outside capital support for its expansion.

Total raised

$129M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Nov 2021