London’s Pusher Launches R&D Labs To Help Devs ‘Make Better Products’

British startup Pusher has opened an R&D lab in London’s Tech City with the goal of building the next generation of developer tools for web development.

Pusher, headed up by CEO Max Williams, is known for its Data Delivery Network (DDN) service, which has been serving customers like New York Times, MailChimp, and gaming app QuizUp their daily dose of real time data delivery services.

Agressive

But Williams now thinks it’s time to expand and to create ‘Pusher Labs’ – which will start hiring “aggressively” this year.

“The demand for software is only going to increase and it doesn’t make sense for every team to build everything themselves,” said Williams in a blog post today.

“We want to provide the building blocks that allow people to build more with less, and to reduce the cognitive overhead of managing increasingly complex systems.”

Pusher’s DDN service recently achieved the accolades of sending out 165 billion realtime messages monthly to 6.5 billion devices. The launch of two regional clusters in Asia and Europe will also help the company, which recently raised £1 million with the help of Passion Capital investor Eileen Burbidge, expand.

A Pusher spokesperson told TechWeekEurope that the R&D lab will have its own website investigating and reporting on web development trends “whilst looking for opportunities to build other products for Pusher alongside its existing Data Delivery Network  product”.

Asked on the reasoning for setting up Pusher Labs, Williams said: “The demand for developers is growing but there’s a limited number out there. This means top talent gets snapped up quickly by big players likes of Google and Facebook. Not only that but many of the tools developers currently use aren’t equipped for the modern web, leading to inefficiency and overstaffing.”

Pusher has plans to launch new services this year, including Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. Currently, Pusher’s DDN service dishes out in-app notifications for customers such as CloudApp, activity feeds for the New York Times’ front page, and synchronisation states for QuizUp.

But Pusher Labs will be an out-of-house experiment, free from the pressures of working on the infrastructure of the company.

“In this environment, we could build prototypes and ideas that seem to fit with where we think the market is going, and what things will help people in the future,” said Williams.

Take our London & Technology quiz here!