Pusher expands to the US, launches Chatkit to continue to grow product portfolio for developers

Under embargo until 6PM GMT / 11AM PST, 1 November 2018

• Pusher is used by more than 3,200 customers to add real-time functionality for their communication and collaboration features in their apps, amongst which The New York Times, Mailchimp, and DraftKings. Over the last year, the company experienced 70% growth in the number of developers using its products.

• Having received $8M funding earlier this year from Balderton Capital and Heavybit, Pusher opens an office in San Francisco, with the ambition to double its US team to 20 by the end of the year.

• Pusher Chatkit, the extensible chat API solution for developers, is the latest in the suite of new products that Pusher released this year to general availability, alongside Pusher Beams, and the company’s flagship product, Channels.

LONDON AND SAN FRANCISCO, 1.11.2018 - Pusher, the leading communications and collaboration API provider, opens a new office in San Francisco and today releases Chatkit to general availability. Chatkit is a chat API solution that comes packed with out-of-the box features to help developers build the best chat experience for mobile and web apps.

Real-time functionality has become a common feature for modern applications, but building it still proves challenging for developers. Pusher has been providing developers with the blocks to develop this functionality into their web and mobile applications for the last seven years. Chatkit incorporates Pusher’s experience of building highly-consistent real-time systems to address the pain points developers have when building messaging features in their applications: customizability, speed, maintenance and most importantly, providing a flawless user experience.

Max Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Pusher comments:

“In addition to moving closer to our breadth of customers in the US, we are releasing new products to continue to make developers’ live easier. With Chatkit, our goal is to help people converse in a highly-integrated way that doesn’t break them out of the user experience. We’ve built a powerful chat API to provide developers with the tools to quickly build the best communication features to meet the needs of their users.”

Having spent 11 months in public beta, Chatkit has matured as a product and has been used by more than 8,000 developers. Since the beta release, new features have been added to the Chatkit API: core messaging features such as rich media support, roles & permissions, read receipts, and support for the most popular programming languages.

In the last 8 months, Chatkit usage has been growing by 31.49% MOM. The Chatkit customers span different sectors from CRM, hotel management, online dating, and cryptocurrency platforms.

One of the Chatkit early adopters, Kenja, is the most advanced enterprise cloud collaboration platform provider in Japan. Philip Butkiewicz, CTO at Kenja Corporation shares their experience:

“We were already familiar with Pusher’s reliable service. So when we needed a flexible chat solution that we could tailor to our audience’s preferences - we investigated Chatkit. We were impressed by Chatkit’s simplicity as we were able to go from zero to a custom chat solution in just a few days.”

Pusher currently employs 66 people across the UK and US. Initially based in the offices of investor Heavybit, the US team is planning to grow its marketing, sales and customer support operations to continue to support the growth of the new products that help developers with their most common infrastructure pain points. Pusher is also looking to hire a VP of Marketing and a VP of People to join COO, Sylvain Giuliani in the US office.

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Notes to editors:

Press Contact: Madalina Grigorie, Communications Manager, Pusher

madalina@pusher.com

+44 (0) 208 068 5538

For more information on Pusher Chatkit visit https://pusher.com/chatkit

Pusher Chatkit on Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pusher-chatkit

Media files: https://app.pr.co/manage/media_kits/220887/

About Pusher

Pusher is a developer tools company that makes communication and collaboration APIs powering web and mobile applications all over the world. With its core product, Channels, developers can easily create interactive features such as in-app notifications, activity streams, chat, real-time dashboards and multi-user collaborative apps.

Founded by Max Williams, Pusher received $11.5M worth of funding in different rounds from Passion Capital, Bill Lee, Heroku, Saas Capital, Balderton Capital and Heavybit. Pusher has over 250,000 developer customers across 170 countries and is used by everyone, from one-person operations to companies such as The New York Times, Mailchimp, and DraftKings. Every month, we send more than 800 billion messages to 9 billion devices across the world.

For more information: pusher.com