After recently receiving a $3 billion valuation, after a Series C round in October, MessageBird has made a move to acquire the London-based real-time web tech company, Pusher. The acquisition price is $35 million, with Pusher co-founder and CEO Max Williams and the small Pusher team of 25 people joining MessageBird.
Back in 2018, Pusher had about 60 people in its team. They have been cutting costs since making the unit smaller and manageable. The technology/product offered by Pusher for its existing customer base will remain independent.
What Pusher brings to MessageBird
The technology for in-app notifications, a developer-friendly API, and the SDK built around ‘push’ will enable MessageBird to plug the gap existing in its own communications platform. MessageBird is stronger in SMS and messaging-first channels like Facebook Messenger, Line, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
Pusher will bring onboard new features like in-app messaging, push notifications, and location tracking.
The acquisition opens up new tools and features that MessageBird can use to help its userbase have more than one way to talk to each other. Pusher was founded in 2011 and aimed to lower the barriers for developers who wanted to build real-time features into their apps and sites.
The progress Pusher made
Initially, the aim was met when Pusher built a real-time API and cloud infrastructure to support it. Developers could make things like rich push notifications, real-time collaboration, communications features, and live content updates.
More recently, the company started unveiling more capabilities for specific real-time functionality.
One of those was Chatkit, an API and SDK that does the heavy lifting needed to add chat functionality to a service or app. All of this has also been extended to include charts and location tracking. Pusher has customers like CodeShip, GitHub, The Financial Times, and Mailchimp.
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