Tiny acquires Meteor

Canadian technology holding company Tiny, home to companies like Dribble, Flow and Unicorn Hunt, today announced that it has acquired Meteor, the JavaScript-centric open-source app platform.

Meteor launched back in 2011 and while it was a developer darling for a while, its momentum stalled a bit in recent years as other technologies rose to the forefront.

Meteor promises developers that they can build their applications’ front- and back-ends as JavaScript apps and also offers Galaxy, a turnkey hosting service for these apps.

Meteor founder Geoff Schmidt will continue to focus on Apollo GraphQL, a platform for making GraphQL run at scale.

“We found ourselves in an interesting situation where we had two great products, Apollo and Meteor, living under the same roof,” Schmidt told me. “Apollo started growing so quickly that the right thing always seemed to put our incremental hours or dollars toward Apollo. So over time it became clear that they needed to be under different roofs so that Meteor wouldn’t get starved for resources and would have the room it needed to grow.”

Tiny promises that it will continue to invest in Meteor, Galaxy and their developer communities. Tiny and Apollo also say they’ll work closely during the transition and “pair their deep knowledge of the platform with Tiny’s ambitious plans.”

What exactly that’ll look like remains to be seen, of course, but Tiny has a relatively good track record of keeping the companies it acquires afloat. Schmidt also notes that users shouldn’t expect any major changes to Meteor or Galaxy in the near future.

“We talked to a lot of more conventional acquirers but ended up working with Tiny because of their strong values in design and community,” Schmidt explained. “At the core, I think Meteor is about developer experience, community, and empowering people to do things that they thought were out of their reach. Tiny is the group that we think is best equipped to carry that mission forward.”