I’m excited to share that Fanout is now part of Fastly! Over the coming months we’ll be rolling out our realtime/push capabilities onto their global network.

See also Fastly’s announcement.

Backstory

In early 2017, we were getting overwhelmed by customer traffic and needed resources to handle enterprise leads. We’d been pitching VCs for a seed round, but nobody was biting. We had to try something different. I went to Fastly’s office in San Francisco and asked if we could install Fanout onto “all of their servers” and split the revenue.

The Fastly team didn’t immediately agree to this, but they didn’t laugh me out of the room either. They believed realtime/push/WebSockets was a space to watch. Over time, demand grew on their end. Jira tickets asking for realtime features turned from a trickle into a flood. Eventually the stars aligned.

An aligned partner

We’ve had several suitors over the years, but most of them either wanted to fold our technology into an unrelated product or were only interested in talent. Even when we could agree on the market opportunity, we would disagree on what should be built. It is important to us that our ideas and tech are recognized.

Fastly is really the first to appreciate our approach to realtime/push: a proxy mechanism with an open integration protocol, enabling customers to own their API contract and migrate freely. Fastly is also well-positioned to succeed in our market, thanks to having a massive network and lots of servers in many countries all over the world. We even have shared customers, and our systems are incredibly compatible. It made sense to team up.

We like to think of them as a super investor, taking us where we’ve always wanted to go. Fastly powers the best of the web, and now we can too.

Why we did this now

Despite being a small, resource-constrained startup, we technically didn’t need to sell. We reached cash flow positive a couple of years ago, and we even did a small angel raise last year to cover a SOC 2 certification process. Who knows, maybe SOC 2 would have enabled us to break out.

However, even in the best case, we were still looking at many more years to become the influential company we wanted to be. Our sale to Fastly is an opportunity to “fast”-track our ideas. We have more resources now and we can reach a much wider audience. It’s a win for our customers and for the industry. Personally, I am really excited about the opportunities in front of us.

What’s next

We are currently integrating into Fastly’s infrastructure, with the aim of retaining as much API compatibility as possible. If there are any changes or migration steps needed, we will reach out to customers accordingly.

Longer term, we plan to integrate with other Fastly products, notably Compute@Edge. Details to come!

Thanks

Thanks to all of our customers for trusting us to power their realtime apps/APIs.

Thanks to each and every investor for taking a chance on us. Special thanks to Seed Sumo for writing the first outside check.

Finally, thanks to our amazing team. Whether you were with us for a season or stayed on for the whole ride, you were all critical to getting us to where we are today. We made a thing!