With $300K funding Appbase lets developers build real time and collaborative app through its API

While working as an infrastructure engineer with Mathify, a digital platform which makes math learning interactive and engaging, Siddharth Kothari and Sagar Chandarana ran into the problem of orchestrating backend systems without failures. After spending 30 caffeinated nights mulling over this, they realized that they were being bogged down by the lack of proper abstractions and multiple ad-hoc integrations in their backend systems.

They started Appbase after spending almost a year and a half on it. Appbase is now building a Twilio for databases. Like Twilio combined voice, telephony and SMS into a single API, Appbase enables developers to build real time, search and collaborative apps by a simple to-use API.

Startups can use Appbase with their existing backend infrastructure to power real time analytics, instant messaging and streaming solutions. With Appbase, building a real time production app takes only a few hours and helps developers to scale seamlessly from one user to one million.

How it works?

Developers can access the Appbase API from any platform - web, mobile or next generation devices. It offers a real time events based database API, ElasticSearch powered search features and collaborative features such as user authentications, security rules via a Javascript SDK and a REST API.

The future of rich social apps lies in being able to listen to changes in the data and the relationships amongst them. Appbase offers exactly this, as a simple API accessible on any platform.

In their past stints, the duo worked at Google, Carnegie Mellon University and both have a major in Computer Science from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology. Appbase crew has expanded to a total of six people spread across three different countries. “We speak five languages amongst us, and have known each other for over four years now,” says Siddharth.

Appbase is currently being accelerated in the Techstars Cloud 2015 batch in San Antonio, Texas. During its beta launch in September, over 130 apps leveraged Appbase platform for development. As of now, more than 4.8 million API calls have been made through the platform.

The startup’s first check for $10k was written by the entrepreneurship cell at DA-IICT. “Since then, we have received over $100k in grant from the startup Brasil program and have recently raised $120k from Techstars and $60k from Carnegie Mellon University,” adds Siddharth. With this funding round, Appbase plans to focus on a real time event-driven API that developers would love to use.

“Our competition is the DIY approach that developers are familiar with while creating custom backend solutions. It's very hard for developers to imagine an integration of the most popular databases - available as a service,” points out Siddharth.

Within the broader ecosystem, on one hand there are BaaS companies like Parse, Kinvey and Firebase and on the other hand there are hosted database services like Compose.io, Mongolab, and Bonsai. “We see ourselves somewhere between the two (BaaS and hosted database services),” concludes Siddharth.