If a company wants to offer in-app messaging or voice calling, it doesn’t have to develop the infrastructure itself when it has something like Twilio at its disposal. Likewise, if you want to support payments there is Stripe, or for maps there is the powerful Google.
But what if a developer is tasked with building real-time multiplayer collaboration into their software, like Google Docs or Figma? Well, that’s where things get a little complicated. One option is to create the software themselves and deploy it to the cloud, although this is a complex and resource-intensive task. Another option is to use a managed service like Pusher (now owned by Twilio rival MessageBird) or Atlassian-backed Liveblocks, which are popular options but may not offer the kind of flexibility a company needs when building its software, due to the fact that they are proprietary third-party services.
And this is where party kit enters the scene, with an open source deployment platform packed with all the necessary libraries for companies looking to integrate multiplayer functionality into their applications.
“In the past, simply building and scaling collaborative backends was something that required subject matter expertise and a large operational investment,” PartyKit founder and CEO Sunil Pai told TechCrunch. “With PartyKit, it’s literally a matter of minutes and is accessible to most.”
PartyKit CEO Sunil Pai flanked by CXO Sylwia Vargas (left) and Jani Evakallio (CTO) Image credits: party kit
Pai left his role as a senior systems engineer at Cloudflare last year and shortly after launched an initial version of PartyKit in partnership with collaborative whiteboard app Tldraw. In the intervening months, Pai began a complete rewrite of the original product to make it suitable for a broader set of use cases, before raising $2.5 million in seed funding.
The so far undisclosed funding was led by venture capital giant Sequoia Capital, with participation from Cursor Capital, Remote First Capital and angel backers including Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder and director of Vercel technology, Guillermo Rauch.
Building blocks
PartyKit is perhaps something like Vercel or Netlify, but with a specific focus on collaboration, so developers bring all their own code, whether JavaScript or TypeScript, and then they can integrate PartyKit with their own tools and services, and try it out. on your own. local machines in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments.
“By providing powerful low-level building blocks that developers can write code on top of, PartyKit allows developers to build applications on their own terms without having to worry about the complexities of the underlying infrastructure,” Pai added.
PartyKit in action: Tldraw synchronized in multiple windows Image credits: party kit
In addition to facilitating real-time collaboration between humans, perhaps as part of a digital whiteboard, game, or code editing application, companies can integrate large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI or even their own internal models. so that a human operator can work in tandem with an ai agent, with PartyKit handling all long-running processes, maintaining memory and context for the machine agent. And all with a few lines of code.
So, for example, a company could develop an ai assistant for some product design software, and the assistant would proactively step in to help with suggestions as they design a website or app. Or perhaps a journalist writing an article could receive fact-checking and similar guidance on tone and structure through a small agent built into her CMS.
“Building applications like this requires real-time infrastructure that sends data and actions to its users,” Pai said. “LLMs now mean that humans collaborate not only with humans, but also with small ai entities with different purposes. There is a huge gap in the platforms that can allow developers to create these types of applications. That’s why I built PartyKit.”
Under the hood, the PartyKit platform is actually built on top of Cloudflare, a nod to the technology‘s genesis when Pai worked at the cloud infrastructure giant for over a year. And before that, Pai also worked on multiplayer apps at Meta’s Oculus division (low latency and in real time are fundamental to the collaborative virtual reality experience).
“In every situation (role), I was surprised by the amount of investment and effort that was put into the infrastructure side to be able to enable collaborative experiences,” Pai said. “While the rest of the application stack has become super accessible to developers over the last 20 years (I remember when you had to be a database expert to blog on the Internet), it hasn’t reached the same level. level of commercialization and accessibility. It came to the multiplayer infrastructure. It is no coincidence that it takes a multi-billion dollar company to create a Google Docs, Figma or a triple A game.”
PartyKit has been in open beta since July and the company announced its first hires a few weeks ago. So today is an effective signal that the company is disclosing its funding and launching its platform into general availability. It is also preparing to introduce premium business-focused features and services, including team support, analytics, compliance, and more. Pai also confirmed that PartyKit would cater for both on-premises and cloud hosting for those who need it, a level of flexibility that will prove particularly important for businesses facing rigorous regulatory scrutiny in terms of how they store and process sensitive data.
“The idea is to bring real-time multiplayer development to millions of developers around the world, and the only way to do that is to sell it as infrastructure,” Pai said.
