Today, I’m excited to announce that Stream has raised a $15M Series A round from GGV Capital and Dick Costolo (Ex Twitter CEO, now 01 Advisors). We are very grateful to our early investors and customers who took a chance on our team and technology.
Many of you started using Stream when the engineering team was just Tommaso and I. Today, our team of 58 (and rapidly growing) powers chat and activity feeds for more than a billion end users. I’m proud that Stream can help companies in segments such as healthcare, education, and social communities during this pandemic.
All of this would not be possible without our team. Their passion for tackling difficult tech problems at scale and creating reusable components enabled our customers to succeed. We want to allow product teams to ship apps faster and with better user experience.
This $15M round is an important milestone. It gives us vastly more resources to improve our activity feed and chat API. We want to get to the point where you can ship chat and feeds at the quality of apps like Slack, Instagram, and Whatsapp in a matter of days. We’re getting closer to that goal every day. You can build an activity feed on top of Stream and grow from 0 to 100 million users without ever having a scaling issue.
Feedback & Suggestions
It’s still a long road ahead of us, and we’d love to hear more from you about things we can improve — anything from documentation improvements, ease of use as well new features. You can email support@getstream.io or post on our public feature voting list.
We’re hiring
We are hiring in Boulder, Amsterdam, and remotely. If you’re passionate about building reusable components at scale, head over to our team page to learn more.
Roadmap
With this funding round, our ability to improve the products is accelerating quite a bit. Here are some of the things currently in the pipeline:
TypeScript Support for All JavaScript SDKs
As the adoption of TypeScript increases, our development team is actively working to provide TypeScript definition files to all JavaScript and Node.js based SDKs. As we continue to move forward, TypeScript definition files will be updated with each release.
SOC 2 Compliance & ISO 27001 Certifications
Stream is currently undergoing an audit for SOC 2 Type 1 and establishing ISO 27001 certifications. While Stream has always been at the forefront of security, this will ensure that our standards meet the highest levels for availability and uptime, confidentiality and privacy of user data, and processing integrity. We expect to achieve SOC 2 Type 1 certification in the coming months, with SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 to follow.
Dashboard 2.0
The current dashboard is going through a complete overhaul. Features such as real-time access to channels and chat messages, in-depth moderation (banning and muting users, etc.), real-time-search, and updated permission changes are included in our beta release just around the corner.
Feeds
The feed API is now five years old and scales and performs amazingly well. When we started Stream, it was common for people to integrate APIs such as Stream via their backend. With the recent trend towards JAMStack, more developers are looking to incorporate Stream on the frontend. We’ve learned a lot from our experience with Chat, and there are a couple of improvements scheduled for the feeds API:
- The API should work well when you’re integrating via the frontend
- Copy the behavior of chat for users, permissions, feed types, reactions, push, moderation, GDPR endpoints and real-time
- Enrichment should be enabled by default, and ORM integrations will be deprecated in favor of handling enrichment on our side (which is more accessible from an integration perspective)
- Reactions counts for ranking
- Updated SDKs for React, React Native, iOS, Android and Flutter
Chat Enhancements
The growth of our chat product has been incredible. It’s great to see use cases in healthcare, education, and communities during these difficult times. Below are some of the notable features we are currently working on:
Location Sharing
Real-time location sharing will allow end-users of applications to share their real-time location for a specified amount of time with the participants of an individual or group chat.
Custom Slash Commands
Slash commands have become a common feature in many messaging applications, specifically Slack and others alike. Slash commands allow users to interact with an application quickly and efficiently. As of now, Stream provides several slash commands with the most notable Slack style slash command being /giphy for easily sharing gifs of their choice with other users.
Custom slash commands will allow you to use slash commands to look up FAQs, start a transaction, send sound bites, or any other workflow you want to implement.
Rich Chat Messaging & MML
The goal for MML is to have a standardized way to handle the most common use cases for message interactivity. MML supports adding buttons to your messages and simple forms with an optimized UI for mobile. Scheduling, images, icons, and tables are supported out of the box. Basically, the idea here is similar to Slack, where you can build any type of interactivity within the chat experience.
Enhanced Push Notifications
Push notifications can be hard to work with. We are working on making this easier to use and quicker to debug when things are not set up correctly.
Slow Mode for Busy Channels
Popular livestreams on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch run into problems when users post too many messages in a short period of time. Stream is currently implementing a "Slow Mode" feature to mitigate this issue. When enabled by a channel's moderators, our solution will enforce a configurable cooldown interval to allow individual users to send a specific number of messages between a set time defined in seconds.
Custom Events
We currently provide broad support for event-driven notifications such as typing events and interactions with messages such as a new message, reactions, etc. With Custom Events for Stream Chat, developers will have further capabilities to define customized events to listen to updates specific to driving a better chat experience for their application.
Final Thoughts
We are very grateful to our customers, investors, and our team members who all took a chance on Stream succeeding. Today we have more resources than ever before to get to work on the chat and activity feed APIs used by a thousand customers and a billion end users.
It’s still a long road ahead of us, and we’d love to hear more from you about things we can improve — anything from documentation improvements, ease of use as well new features. You can email support@getstream.io or post on our public feature voting list.
We are hiring in Boulder, Amsterdam, and remotely. If you’re passionate about building reusable components at scale, head over to our team page to learn more.