Parse (company)

Founded by Tikhon Bernstam, James Yu, Ilya Sukhar, and Kevin Lacker, Parse is a cloud-based software developer providing kits for building desktop, mobile, and embedded device applications.

Parse was part of the Y Combinator S11 Batch, founded by participants of the 2011 Y Combinator Program, but was acquired by Facebook in 2013 for $85 million. Before Facebook acquired Parse, the platform was used by 20,000 mobile developers and saw a 40% customer increase monthly. By 2014, after the acquisition, it was reported the platform was hosting over 500,000 applications.

In January of 2016, Facebook announced it would be closing the Parse Hosting Service. However, the Parse code was open-sourced by Facebook, to allow the migration of apps to self-host. Parse provided a server, called MongoDB, allowing developers to migrate to a new self-hosted server while continuing to have access to the Parse dashboard. However, several vendors are capable of hosting Parse applications, allowing developers to move their applications to avoid self-hosting. On January 30th, 2018, Parse discontinued its hosting services.