Superfeedr
A feed api and fetches and parses rss or atom feeds for its users and pushes them the new entries in these feeds.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Superfeedr was established in 2009 by its founder, Julien Genestoux, as a real-time feed processing platform operating under the parent company Notifixious, Inc.. Genestoux, a French software engineer and vocal advocate for the open web, had prior entrepreneurial experience, having founded Jobetudiant, a leading job board for students in France, while still in school. His passion for open protocols was a driving force behind Superfeedr, which aimed to facilitate a freer and easier exchange of information across the web.
The company's core business was providing a robust feed API that simplified how developers and publishers handled web feeds like RSS and Atom. For its clients, which included publishers, subscribers, and content trackers, Superfeedr offered a service to fetch, parse, and push feed updates in real-time. This was achieved by utilizing and building upon open protocols such as PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and WebSub, which Genestoux co-authored at the W3C. The platform acted as a default hub, enabling real-time updates even for feeds that didn't natively support the protocols, otherwise falling back to polling. Revenue was generated through a usage-based pricing model for its API services.
The service provided significant benefits to its users by eliminating the need for them to build and maintain costly and complex polling infrastructure. Subscribers received normalized data in standardized Atom or JSON formats, regardless of the original feed's format, and could track complex keyword queries in real-time. Publishers could use the service to efficiently distribute their content and improve their SEO by ensuring search engines could quickly identify new content. In late 2009, Superfeedr secured seed funding from notable investors Mark Cuban and Betaworks, reaching break-even status a year later. After operating as an independent entity for eight years, Superfeedr was acquired by the online publishing platform Medium in June 2016 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was seen as a strategic fit, aligning with Medium's goal to support open protocols and become a primary destination for content publishing and distribution.
Keywords: feed API, RSS, PubSubHubbub, Atom, real-time data, content aggregation, webhooks, data parsing, keyword tracking, content distribution