Pusher
More info
- Creator
- Max Williams
- Founded
- 2010
- Type
- Realtime API (WebSocket)
- Owner
- MessageBird (2020)
- Website
- pusher.com
British realtime platform whose hosted WebSocket API let web apps push live updates without running their own server infrastructure.
Founded in London in 2010 by Max Williams. The flagship product, Channels, abstracts away the WebSocket plumbing: a client subscribes to a channel, the server publishes events, and Pusher handles connections, scaling and reconnects. It became an early default for notification badges, live chat and collaborative cursors around 2012–2015, before home-grown stacks and self-hosted alternatives ate into the market.
MessageBird — a Dutch Twilio challenger — acquired Pusher in December 2020 for roughly $35 million and folded it into its communications suite. Channels still ships as a standalone product.