Stream offers APIs for activity feeds and chat that developers can integrate into apps with a few lines of code. The company began with activity‑feed APIs and expanded into chat, currently integrating third‑party chatbots and using Dolby for audio and video while planning to bring more components in‑house. Stream has said it wants to add end‑to‑end encryption and build more chatbot and media capabilities itself. Its technology is used across sectors including healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University. Apps that use Stream’s services collectively cover more than 1 billion users, and the company reported chat revenue grew 500% in 2020. Stream was co‑founded in Amsterdam in 2015 and now has its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, while retaining a substantial team in Amsterdam. Stream builds APIs focused on activity feeds and, more recently, chat to help product teams add social features to their apps. The company started with activity feeds and began developing a chat API about 10 months ago after customers tried to build chat on top of feeds. Customers named in the article include Harvard, Dubsmash and Healthline. Stream is a five-year-old, 60-person startup with offices in Boulder and Amsterdam and was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli. The founders entered Techstars when the company was two months old in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic some smaller customers folded and one larger customer went bankrupt, but demand rose from education, healthcare, online events and religious communities. Financially, Stream closed a $15 million Series A led by GGV Capital, bringing total funding to $20.25 million. Stream offers an API for creating personalized news feeds that app creators can embed and scale within their apps. Its clients include Product Hunt, Google's Fabric, and Unsplash, and its feeds reach around 200 million end users. The company says news feeds are the dominant way of discovering content online and are used in 22% of apps. Stream plans to use new funding to accelerate product development, expand support for larger customers, add multi-region capabilities, and enhance machine-learning for personalization. It also intends to build up a small marketing and sales effort and grow its team. Stream has raised a total of €4.75 million to date and maintains an office in Boulder, CO. Stream sells newsfeed development and management as a service, building on an open-source feed project its team created. The original open-source project is about three years old and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Founders Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli began working on Stream in August after leaving prior startups and participated in the Techstars NY accelerator. Originally founded in Amsterdam, the company relocated operations to Boulder due to visa issues. Stream reports 120 companies are "in production" with the service, including its largest customer, GoldenLine.pl. The company positions its managed feed offering as a scalable alternative to costly in-house feed solutions used by many apps.

Total raised

$58M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Mar 2021