PubNub, the startup that has built a data network that carries messaging for apps, IoT hardware and other low-latency services, is today announcing that it has extended and closed its Series C round. The San Francisco-based company has raised $25 million, funding that it will use to sharpen its focus on Internet of Things applications and hardware as well as clean energy and social collaboration.
We first reported on the round in July, when originally PubNub had raised $20 million. To date, the company has now raised just over $40 million.
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures (originally SAP’s venture arm), with participation from Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC) — the strategic investment arm of the consumer and business electronics giant Bosch — as well Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and Envision Ventures; as well as previous investors Relay Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and TiE Angels.
“We’re thrilled to join this investment round with PubNub, which we recognize is driving some of the hottest social and entertainment apps on the market,” said Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, in a statement. “We have a tremendous amount of confidence in the management team and believe PubNub is poised for exponential growth.”
The company is not disclosing revenues, profitability or valuation but when we asked about all these in July, CEO Todd Greene described the it as “rosy. Very solid and exciting.”
In any case, the company is growing pretty rapidly. When we covered the funding in July, it was sending messages across some 200 million devices. Three months later, that number is now up to 300 million devices. PubNub currently has some 2,000 customers and partners, with 750 billion realtime transactions processed per month on average.
While some of the company’s more recognizable customer names include Yahoo, McDonald’s and CBS, its new relationship with Bosch is likely to lead to PubNub’s numbers ramping up even further with a strong boost from enterprise apps around IoT.
As we noted in July, two areas where PubNub may be likely to invest in the months and years ahead is to build out its infrastructure and offer messaging relays across private networks. Today the company runs an amalgamation of operations across third-party data centers, something that it may look to shift as it moves deeper into M2M enterprise apps.
“Today we offer the service the global network on which people deploy applications. We don’t have anything to announce yet on hybrid solutions but it is something we are considering,” Greene told us in July. That will put PubNub also in closer competition with the likes of Realtime, Pusher and Google.
