We’re excited to announce that Drifting in Space has raised $2.5mm to build infrastructure for ambitious browser-based applications.

Browsers keep getting more powerful, and developers have embraced technologies like WebGL and WebAssembly to build increasingly powerful applications. These applications often require high-performance computation on the server. As a result, these developers often find themselves building infrastructure from scratch, because they need functionality that a typical stateless, request/response server model can’t deliver.

We’re building server infrastructure that allows these applications to act more like native applications, by giving them the ability to capture dedicated resources for the duration of a user session.

An analytics application might load gigabytes of data into dedicated server memory for instant analysis. An ML-powered creative tool might allocate a GPU to power real-time feedback on human input. A video editor might stream playback from a high-memory backend close to the media library.

In each case, when the user closes the tab, the resources are seamlessly released for use by others.

We’ve used our product, Jamsocket, to run a desktop-based image editor in the browser with pixel streaming, and power interactive analysis of a 20+ million row dataset. We’re in the process of open-sourcing our control plane, Plane, which backs it. If you’re developing ambitious software in the browser, we’d love to hear from you at hi@driftingin.space or @drifting_corp.

Investors in the round include Garage Capital, Soma Capital, and Abstraction Capital, Rogue Capital, Wayfinder, Velocity, and YR Ventures, founders Mike Driscoll (Rill Data), Lukas Biewald (Weights & Biases), Sina Kashuk and Isaac Brodsky (Unfolded), Shinji Kim (Select Star), Patrick Hayes (SigOpt), Amy Yin (Office Together), Kam Lasater (Cyclic.sh), Ryan Cooke (JumpWire), and Thomas Piccirello (Doppler), and others. We also participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch.

Note: when this post was written, Plane was called Spawner. The post has been updated to reflect this change.