Stream builds real-time APIs that let developers add chat, video, audio and activity-feed functionality to their applications without assembling the infrastructure in-house. Its product line comprises a Chat API, a Video API, an Audio API and an Activity Feeds API, all sitting on a global edge network designed for mission-critical workloads. The underlying platform reports 99.999% uptime, average response times of roughly 9 milliseconds, and the capacity to handle 5 million concurrent connections.
The engineering problems are those of distributed systems at scale. Stream's stack runs on Go and Python over PostgreSQL, RocksDB and Redis, and makes use of Raft consensus for distributed computing across an edge network serving more than 1 billion end users across over 4,000 applications. The company has spent nine years scaling this infrastructure and has raised $58.25 million to date.
Stream serves customers in social and collaboration apps, dating platforms, marketplaces, gaming, virtual events, healthcare, financial services, education and sports; among the brands relying on it are Strava, Nextdoor, Patreon, IBM and Adobe. The company maintains a distributed team with offices in Boulder, Colorado; Amsterdam; Skopje, North Macedonia; and Toronto, and holds HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 certifications.
