Earlier today Firebase announced that we and Union Square Ventures led a $5.6M Series A investment in the company.  We first led the company's seed round in the middle of 2012 and were thrilled to help fuel the company's continued growth with this financing.

When we committed to the seed we did so for four reasons: 1) we loved the two founders, James Tamplin and Andrew Lee and their vision for their market, 2) we had a hunch that real time features were going to be increasingly important for a broad range of applications, 3) the Firebase platform, which allows developers to implement real time apps with no back-end server code, was going to be an attractive way to do this and 4) the early signs of grassroots developer adoption were quite positive.  

Over the course of the seed investment the company proved out many of these assumptions and in a nut shell, that is why we are leaning into the Series A financing.  The two founders have hired an extremely impressive group of developers, this team has knocked down all the items on their roadmap in a very efficient and rapid manner, developer adoption has exceeded by a large margin all of our expectations and compares very favorably to what we have seen in the early days of other companies with similar business models such as mongoDB and Crashlytics and the company's customers are passionate advocates for the service (including one of my favorite diligence quotes of all time – "it is indistinguishable from magic, I feel like an alchemist").  

We often get asked what causes us to lead a Series A after a Seed investment.  Based on the above I would say the answer is hire well, meet or exceed your goals, add lots of users and make them incredibly happy!  Easier said then done, so hats off to James, Andrew and team on their success to date.