Google today announced that it has acquired Firebase, a backend service that helps developers build realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web that can store and sync data instantly. Firebase currently has almost 110,000 registered developers on its platform and the Firebase team says that the service will continue to work as before and remain platform-agnostic.
Firebase, which launched about three years ago, says that joining Google will allow it to scale its service dramatically. “With Google’s engineering talent, resources and technical infrastructure, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster,” the team writes. In addition, the Firebase team believes that its mission is complementary to Google’s. Thanks to the acquisition, Google’s customers will be able to write apps faster and Firebase’s users will gain access to Google’s infrastructure.
For Google, this acquisition mostly seems to be about technology and talent, but it will also introduce Firebase’s 100,000 developers to its Cloud Platform.
Google plans to announce new Firebase features at its Google Cloud Platform Live event on November 4. Chances are this acquisition only closed recently, but Google has a history of integrating the services it acquires for Cloud Platform rather quickly.
This is Google’s third major acquisition for its Cloud Platform this year after acquiring monitoring service Stackdriver (and quickly integrating it) and Zync for bringing visual effects rendering to its cloud computing service.
In total, Firebase, which was founded by Andrew Lee and James Tamplin, raised about $7 million in a seed round in 2012 and a $5.6 million Series A round in 2013.
