Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve closed $65 million in a Series E investment round, led by The Raine Group. This funding allows us to innovate even faster and more quickly reach companies who are demanding better connected experiences in their products. This financing round, with participation from Sapphire, Scale, HPE, and Bosch, brings our company’s total funding amount to over $130 million.
Our mission at PubNub is to enable companies to deliver online experiences that are as engaging and rewarding, if not more so, than those in the real world. Companies like Adobe, RingCentral, and DocuSign—along with thousands of others in over 70 countries—use PubNub today to connect 600 million monthly devices to users on virtually every part of the globe. Companies like Veeps (Live Nation) make concerts more accessible to a global audience and allow artists to interact directly with their fans using PubNub. Gaming companies like Pocket Gems use PubNub to drive social interactions during gameplay. And healthcare companies like NurseGrid have improved the work-life balance of nurses by having real-time scheduling assignments and updates.
Regardless of the industry, PubNub powers software that delivers compelling real-time connected experiences in what we call a “Virtual Space”. What are Virtual Spaces? There’s been a lot of recent hype about the “metaverse,” but the reality is that a Virtual Space is where real-time interactions happen online. Virtual Space apps are things we already use daily, without strapping anything to our heads. Apps like rideshare, chat, virtual events, gaming, healthcare, eLearning, and SmartHome all require people and devices to be synchronized together so they can collaborate and be controlled in real-time. And PubNub’s Virtual Space Platform delivers the core functionality to make it easy to build and deliver these kinds of apps.
When Stephen and I launched PubNub in 2012, we started by delivering the core message component needed for all real-time connected experiences. And as the requirements of Virtual Space apps have grown, so has PubNub. We now provide the ability for customers to manage all the aspects of their real-time app: the Spaces (where users collaborate), the Participants (users and devices), the Communication (i.e. messaging, etc.) and the Control (supporting the rules required within each space).
With this raise, we will continue to iterate on our developer-first API platform to make it even easier for our customers to build and deliver amazing connected experiences for their users. As use cases like virtual events, enterprise collaboration, chat, rideshare/delivery, telehealth, connected fitness, gaming, and smart home have expanded globally, we’ll be growing our fantastic team with an expansion in APAC and a new office planned in Singapore. And as we expand globally, we’re excited to get to know even more innovative development teams building the apps for the next generation! We’ve continued to learn so much from our customers, and we’re looking forward to innovating together in 2022 and beyond.
If you’re interested in learning more about our 2022 product roadmap and vision, we will be hosting the first PubNub Connect summit on November 16th and 17th, where you can learn about Virtual Spaces and why they’re essential to creating connected experiences and communities.
