Stream Raises $38 Million Series B Led by Felicis Ventures

Investment Occurs 6 Months Post-Series A; Accelerates Global Growth for Chat & Activity Feed APIs

Stream, the creator of enterprise-grade activity feed and chat APIs, today announces the close of its $38 million Series B funding round, led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut with participation from Series A lead investor GGV Capital and 01 Advisors. The Series B follows just six months after the company’s $15 million Series A round in August 2020, bringing total financing to $53 million. The accelerated financing rounds signal market uptake of Stream’s innovative technology as chat becomes the dominant medium for day-to-day communications.

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Stream provides APIs which enable product teams to build chat and activity feeds for their applications at scale in a fraction of the time and cost of developing in-house. Stream powers in-app experiences for more than a billion end-users, working with customers in segments as diverse as healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating and social. Notable customers include TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University.

The investment comes after the company experienced a 517% increase in revenue from its chat API product in 2020, while more than doubling its chat and activity feed user base to support over one billion end users. As organizations moved swiftly in the past year to expand online operations and fuel virtual communication, many turned to Stream’s chat API and SDKs to efficiently implement messaging solutions.

“The API economy creates a golden age for engineers and product teams,” said Stream Co-founder & CEO Thierry Schellenbach. “With a proven API foundation to build on, teams go from concept to launch in a fraction of the time it would take to develop comparable functionality from scratch. The boost in efficiency allows engineers to focus on core features that differentiate their product instead of reinventing the wheel.”

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, recognized market potential in Stream’s proven chat technology and approached Schellenbach through an introduction by a Felicis founder almost immediately after the close of the company’s Series A.

Senkut, an original super angel turned multi-stage investor, is well-known for backing Shopify, Fitbit, Rovio, PluralSight and API-focused startup Adyen.

“APIs allow project managers to move much more efficiently than in the past, and as a result, we’re seeing continued growth in the sector,” said Senkut. “Stream is at the forefront of the API wave, and we’re very pleased to have them join the Felicis portfolio.”

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Additional investors in the round include Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Amsterdam-based Knight Capital; Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin; and Selcuk Atli, co-founder and CEO of Bunch. Knight, Pomel and Preston-Werner have historically invested in Stream, while Boufarhat and Atli are new investors.

“We’ve loved working with Thierry, Tommaso, and the entire team at Stream over the past six months and continue to be impressed by their growth and dedication to elevating in-app messaging and activity feeds for more than a billion end-users globally,” said Tiffany Luck, investor at GGV Capital and Stream board member.

“Stream’s technology addresses a common problem in product development by offering an easy-to-integrate and scalable messaging solution,” said Dick Costolo, co-founder and managing partner of 01 Advisors, and former Twitter CEO. “Beyond that, their team and clear vision set them apart, and we ardently back their mission.”

Stream supports a wide range of customers – from startup to enterprise – with a variety of plans and ease of customization to fit their individual needs. Regardless of size, product teams trust Stream to launch faster, iterate more often and ship a better user experience.

“The Stream Chat integration process was basically just one line of code,” said Jack McMillan, co-founder of Student+, a messaging app purpose-built for new students at the University of Edinburgh. “It almost felt like cheating because it was so easy to integrate.”

“It was important to us to choose a partner that could scale with the rapid growth we’ve been supporting in the virtual events space,” said Elissa Ewers, director of product management at Freeman, the world’s leading provider of live events and brand experiences. “We chose Stream Chat to integrate into our leading hybrid event platform, OnlineEvent®, because we valued a secure chat solution that would be quick and easy to implement, and support functionality such as channels, groups, file sharing, threads, and more.”

Stream was founded by Schellenbach and Chief Technology Officer Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam. The company participated in the Techstars NYC accelerator program in 2015 and subsequently moved its headquarters to Boulder, Colo. Today, Stream employs nearly 100 people in Amsterdam, Boulder and remotely.

Stream plans to invest in scaling its global team. In 2020, the team tripled in size, and the personnel growth will continue with the new funding.

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