Instant harkens back to a pre-Google Firebase

Instant wants to recapture some of the magic of the pre-Google-acquisition Firebase by building a modern, Postgres-based open source version of it.  

Like the original Firebase, San Francisco-based Instant focuses on giving front-end developers easy access to a real-time database with offline capabilities without the need to manage any of the back-end architecture. The service supports applications written in React, React Native, and vanilla JavaScript. In addition to the database, it also offers tools to manage authentication and permissions, as well as real-time features like shared cursors, presence, and more. 

The team recently open sourced the project. 

Instant was founded by former roommates Joe Averbukh (CEO) and Stepan Parunashvili who previously worked at companies like Wit.ai, Facebook, Airbnb, and others. 

At Facebook, Averbukh told me, the architecture was set up to ensure that as a front-end engineer, he was able to move quickly. Meanwhile, at Airbnb, the company’s intricate microservices architecture meant it took a long time to try a new idea. “Thankfully, we already had Firebase inside Airbnb, and we could use it for notifications. So we would actually just use Firebase to prototype these ideas — and that was a huge win,” he explained. 

Before starting Instant, the co-founders worked on a fitness app, based on Google’s Firebase. While they loved all of the features like optimistic updates and offline mode that Firebase offers out of the box, they missed having access to a relational database since Firebase’s focus is on its NoSQL database. 

“You see apps like Figma, Notion and Linear –they’re winning the market because of this feature set that they have,” Averbukh said. “And we think that basically, in the same way that apps today are much better than apps before, the expectations are going to rise for what people want in their apps. But the reality is, the way that people build these features today is that they have this whole team that’s building all of these sync services.”

At the core of all of this is Aurora, AWS’s relational database service, which is cost-effective and allows Instant to quickly spin up new databases inside of a multi-tenant architecture that still offers strong security guarantees. Averbukh argues that competitors like Supabase have to spin up a new database for every project (and free user), while Instant essentially lives in one large Postgres instance. He also stressed that if a large enterprise customer would sign up for the service, the team could offer them to spin them up a separate database.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it has raised a $3.4 million seed funding round. It’s backed by YCombinator and SV Angel, as well as prominent angel investors like former Firebase CEO James Tamplin, Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, and Jeff Dean.