The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Feb 2016

Iron.io offers an enterprise-grade job processing platform that delivers and processes hundreds of millions of messages and tasks every day. Its microservices architecture is delivered via Docker containers and supports asynchronous workloads in public and private clouds, on-premises, or hybrid environments. The platform is used by customers including Turner, Twitter, HotelTonight, Untappd and Google. Led by CEO and co-founder Chad Arimura, the company focuses on enabling faster product delivery and revenue growth through scalable job processing. Iron.io will use the new funding to expand its feature set and accelerate growth in the enterprise market. The recent financing extended its Series A to $11.5M. Iron.io offers two flagship products: the IronMQ message queue service and IronWorker, a worker platform for running parallel tasks at scale. Both services are cloud-agnostic and designed to help developers adopt microservices by breaking applications into smaller independent parts that communicate over APIs. The platform can be used on-premises, in public or private clouds, or in hybrid environments. Customers include Hotel Tonight, which uses the platform for real-time hotel availability generators, and Bleacher Report, which uses it to push real-time updates to millions of mobile users. The company said the new funding will be used to grow engineering, sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Prior to this round, Iron.io had raised $5.5 million in seed funding. Iron.io is an application infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider that makes multiple cloud application services including IronWorker and IronMQ. IronWorker, launched in January, is a scalable task queue that has executed over 10 million tasks and supports thousands of jobs per day for its user base. IronMQ, announced in public beta alongside the funding, is a flexible message queue for orchestrating data and event flow within and between cloud applications. The services let developers offload front-end tasks and background processing so they can focus on building applications rather than plumbing. Pricing is usage-based with free message blocks and compute hours per month, and developers can sign up for a free trial of IronMQ. The company closed a $1.4 million seed funding round led by Baseline Ventures.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2011

Flow Corporation provides a realtime data platform that gives developers a turnkey backend for stream processing, aggregation and permissioned data exchange across web, mobile and enterprise apps. By enabling inter-app communication, the service helps developers enrich their products with contextual information drawn from complementary sources. For end users, the company offers iFlow.com, a dashboard where consumers and enterprises can discover, curate and share filtered realtime information streams, functioning as a next-generation RSS reader focused on ideas rather than people. The founders plan to introduce a marketplace where data owners can set business rules and sell subscriptions to their realtime data streams. Flow’s platform is currently in beta and accessible via invite. To finance continued feature development and the build-out of the data marketplace, the company has secured a two-part $3 million seed round. Flow has not yet disclosed user adoption or revenue figures.