Last month, I wrote about Y Combinator-backed Firebase and its ambitious vision to reinvent the infrastructure of real-time apps . Now the company is announcing that some big investors have signed on to that vision, with a $1.1 million round led by Flybridge Capital Partners. Other investors in the round include Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Data Collective, Founder Collective, Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah, early Facebook engineers Brian Shire and Lucas Nealan, former LinkedIn VP Adam Nash, and XDegrees founder Michael Tanne. Combined with an unannounced round last year (from YC/Start Fund/SV Angel, Ken Thom, and Inspovation Ventures), the company has now raised $1.4 million.
Firebase started out as Envolve, a real-time chat service. Towards the end of its time at YC last summer, the team decided to pursue what it saw as a bigger opportunity — building the infrastructure for any developer wanting to create real-time web apps (and eventually mobile apps too). Co-founder James Tamplin says that with Firebase, developers can focus on design and front-end coding, without worrying about the backend. In the month after announcing its beta test, Firebase says it has seen 7,000 developer signups. Its next big priority: security and permission features.
