Participated · Seed · Sep 2021

Liveblocks offers high-level hosted APIs that let developers turn regular web apps into multiplayer products. It launched a presence state API that shows who is viewing a document and tracks cursors in real time. The company is rolling out a live storage API to enable simultaneous viewing and editing of data, enabling collaborative whiteboards, note-taking apps, and multiplayer CMSs. Liveblocks focuses on conflict resolution with offline support and multiplayer undo/redo to reduce synchronization issues. The platform integrates with client libraries such as Zustand and Redux. Over the past three months, connections to Liveblocks rooms have increased tenfold, a metric the company expects to grow with rising remote work and SaaS adoption. The startup recently closed a financing that supports these product and growth efforts. Liveblocks offers a high-level API that lets developers add real-time collaboration and multiplayer experiences to web or app products. It began with a live presence state API that shows when someone joins a page or document, displays avatars, and shares cursor, text selection and content selection positions in real time. The company is testing a live storage API in private beta to let multiple people view and edit the same data in real time, enabling use cases like Google Docs competitors or integrated whiteboard tools. Liveblocks uses WebSocket connections and works across browsers and devices; pricing is based on expected simultaneous connections per room, document, or experience. The founders — Guillaume Salles and CEO Steven Fabre — originally built the APIs while developing a browser-based collaborative presentation/video tool and then decided to productize them. With $1.4M raised in a pre-seed round, the two-person team plans to hire engineers and launch the live storage API.