Ably

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Ably is a British company in London that builds a global real-time messaging platform for developers. It provides APIs and SDKs so apps can send messages instantly.

Founded in 2013 by Matthew O'Riordan (CEO) and Paddy Byers (CTO), the team spent three years on research and development before launching the platform in 2016. Ably is backed by MMC Ventures, Insight Partners, and Dawn Capital.

Its flagship product, Ably Pub/Sub, is a WebSocket-based publish-subscribe system on a globally distributed edge network. The platform offers SDKs and APIs in multiple languages, helping developers build real-time apps for live collaboration, live chat, data synchronization, and notifications.

Key milestones:
- February 2023: integrated with the Netlify Integrations Hub.
- A Next.js starter kit on the Vercel Templates Marketplace.
- October 2023: launched Spaces with an SDK for collaborative features like avatars, live cursors, and component locking (similar to Figma or Google Docs).
- 2024: launched Ably Chat, with typing indicators, presence, reactions, and flexible chat configurations from one-to-one to many-to-many.
- Late 2025: introduced Ably AI Transport, a drop-in layer for AI agent apps to handle long-running, stateful AI interactions.
- Ably is also available on AWS Marketplace.