Today, I’m excited to announce that Stream has closed its $38 million Series B funding round, led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut with participation from Series A lead investor GGV Capital and 01 Advisors. This round follows just six months after our $15 million Series A in August, bringing total financing to $53 million.
Stream experienced a 517% increase in revenue from our chat product in 2020, more than doubling our chat API and activity feed user base to support more than one billion end users. Over the past year, organizations were forced to move swiftly to expand online operations and facilitate on-screen communication in a world that became almost fully virtual. Many of them turned to Stream’s chat API and SDKs to efficiently implement messaging solutions to keep up with the market uptake of in-app chat as it became the dominant medium for day-to-day communications.
Stream provides APIs that enable product teams to build chat and activity for their applications at scale in a fraction of the time and cost of developing in-house. Stream powers in-app experiences for more than a billion end users, supporting customers in segments like healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro, and Stanford University.
Words from our Investors
Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, recognized market potential in Stream's proven chat technology and approached Schellenbach through an introduction by a Felicis founder almost immediately after the close of the company’s Series A. Senkut, an original super angel turned multi-stage investor, is well-known for backing Shopify, Fitbit, Rovio, PluralSight, and API-focused startup Adyen.
“APIs allow project managers to move much more efficiently than in the past, and as a result, we’re seeing continued growth in the sector,” said Senkut. “Stream is at the forefront of the API wave, and we’re very pleased to have them join the Felicis portfolio.”
“We've loved working with Thierry, Tommaso, and the entire team at Stream over the past six months and continue to be impressed by their growth and dedication to elevating in-app messaging and activity feeds for more than a billion end-users globally,” said Tiffany Luck, investor at GGV Capital and Stream board member.
“Stream’s technology addresses a common problem in product development by offering an easy-to-integrate and scalable messaging solution,” said Dick Costolo, co-founder and managing partner of 01 Advisors, and former Twitter CEO. “Beyond that, their team and clear vision set them apart, and we ardently back their mission.”
Additional investors in the round include Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Amsterdam-based Knight Capital; Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin; and Selcuk Atli, co-founder, and CEO of Bunch. Knight, Pomel, and Preston-Werner have historically invested in Stream, while Boufarhat and Atli are new investors.
We’re Hiring
In 2020, the team tripled in size, and the personnel growth will continue with the new funding. We are hiring in Boulder, Amsterdam, and remotely, so check out our team page for the current open positions.
Feedback & Suggestions
It's been an exciting journey thus far, and we are looking forward to the road ahead! We have grown based on responses and reactions from our customers, so we'd love to hear from you. We always welcome product requests and comments via support, so email support@getstream.io with any feedback.
Roadmap
Exciting things are up for 2021, like:
- Completion of SOC 2 + ISO27001 certifications (note: we've already completed Type 1, and we are completing Type 2 this year).
- Advanced Chat Moderation (AI-based text moderation) GA – in Beta now.
- New Major versions and continued iteration/investment in Chat Mobile SDKs (iOS Native, Android Native, React Native, and Flutter).
- New Major versions and continued iteration/investment in Feeds SDKs (Javascript, React, React Native, and Flutter).
- Continued best-in-class scale (millions of users in a single channel).
Significant Improvements to the Stream Dashboard (debugging, maintenance tools to modify data easily without code changes, moderation, usage tracking, etc).
Final Thoughts
We are very grateful for these accelerated funding rounds from our investors and for our customers who put trust in our team and technology. This $38M round is another important milestone for Stream, as it provides us with more resources to scale the global team and enhance our chat and activity feed APIs.
We’d love to hear more from you about things we can improve — anything about documentation, integration, ease of use, new feature requests, etc. Again, you can email support@getstream.io to share your feedback.
Thank you for being a part of the ride,
Thierry & The Stream Team