Stream Raises $15 Million Series A to Accelerate Global Growth Across In-App Messaging

Stream.io, Inc., the creator of enterprise-grade activity feed and chat APIs, announced the close of its $15 million Series A financing today, led by GGV Capital with participation from new investor 01 Advisors, Knight, seed round lead investor Arthur Ventures, and other backers, including Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub. Tiffany Luck from GGV Capital will join the Stream board of directors. Stream plans to invest heavily in scaling its global team across engineering, sales, and marketing.

Stream provides APIs which enable product teams to build chat and activity feeds for their applications at scale in a fraction of the time and cost of developing in-house. It allows product teams to focus their vital development resources on what makes their app unique. Stream powers experiences for over a billion users across their two products and is on a mission to elevate the quality of apps for users worldwide.

“Stream’s APIs for chat and activity feeds enables product teams to build a polished user experience,” said Thierry Schellenbach, co-founder and CEO. “Our customers launch faster and can iterate more often than teams that build in-house.”

During these difficult times, Stream is helping companies in segments such as healthcare, education, finance, fitness, dating and social to connect their community. The APIs are designed for scalability and several of the largest websites and apps use Stream. Notable companies include Healthline, Powerschool, Stocktwits, Freeletics, Match, TaskRabbit, Imgur and Dubsmash.

“Bunch is all about playing your favorite games with friends anytime – anywhere. But to bring people back together with friends, we needed a reliable real-time text chat solution. The integration process was straightforward, quick, and simple, and we felt supported by the team at Stream every step of the way. We like that Stream Chat offers a lot of what we need from a chat solution out of the box while functioning as a robust and scalable solution,” said Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch.live.

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Historically, companies have built feeds and chat in-house. With applications growing faster than ever before, and users expecting a seamless UX, building in-house is becoming less feasible. Stream offers a level of performance and quality that companies used to spend years on with an internal team. Much like we saw immense capacity improvements with the shift from traditional data centers to the cloud, Stream enables organizations to move to a higher abstraction level when building apps.

Stream was founded by Thierry Schellenbach and Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The company participated in the Techstars NYC program. After the program, Stream moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colorado. Today it employs 55 people in Amsterdam and Boulder, as well as remote.

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“With the proliferation of applications, in-app engagement has never been more important to user experience,” said Tiffany Luck of GGV Capital. “Stream is empowering teams to incorporate chat and activity feeds quickly, scalably, and reliably. At GGV we’re very excited to partner with the incredible team at Stream as they go after this massive global opportunity, fueling the next $1 trillion software wave.”

Dick Costolo: “The messaging as a service market is massive and growing. Stream’s technology advantage, the fantastic customer success capability the team has built, and Thierry’s vision for the future all make this an exciting investment and partnership.”

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