Ably

Ably (also known as Ably Realtime) is a British company based in London, United Kingdom. The company is the developer of a global realtime messaging platform and provides APIs and SDKs for software developers.

History

Ably was co-founded in 2013 by Matthew O'Riordan and Paddy Byers. O'Riordan, who previously co-founded Econsultancy, is the CEO. Byers, who holds a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, serves as CTO.

The founders spent three years in research and development before officially launching the platform in 2016. The company has been supported by firms such as MMC Ventures, Insight Partners, and Dawn Capital.

Technology

Ably's flagship product is Ably Pub/Sub, a WebSocket-based publish-subscribe platform built on a globally distributed edge network. The platform has expanded with products that have SDKs and APIs available in multiple languages. These enable developers to build realtime applications at scale with features such as live collaboration, live chat, data synchronisation, and notifications.

In February 2023, Ably announced its integration with the Netlify Integrations Hub. The company also launched a Next.js starter kit on the Vercel Templates Marketplace.

Ably launched Spaces in October 2023, with an SDK for building collaborative application features such as avatar stacks, live cursors, and component locking. The SDK allows developers to build collaborative environments similar to those found in applications like Figma and Google Docs.

Ably launched Ably Chat in 2024. Features include typing indicators, presence detection, message reactions, and support for various chat configurations from one-to-one to many-to-many rooms.

In late 2025, the company announced Ably AI Transport, a drop-in infrastructure layer designed for AI agent applications, addressing the limitations of HTTP streaming for long-running, stateful AI interactions.

Ably is also available through AWS Marketplace.