We have some exciting news about Parse and the future of our platform.

We're happy to announce that we are in the current batch of Y Combinator (Summer 2011), and, in two short months, we've raised $1.1 million in a seed round from a stellar group of investors, including Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Yuri Milner, Google Ventures, and Menlo Ventures.

We'd also like to introduce the team behind Parse. We are Tikhon Bernstam, James Yu, Ilya Sukhar, and Kevin Lacker. We are all passionate developers that understand the pain that is backend development for mobile devices. Each of us is also technical startup veterans that have a wealth of experience in both developers tools and consumer products. Read more about our backgrounds here.

We've been pushing hard over the past few months on developing the Parse platform. And there's been some great responses from our early beta developers that have taken the plunge. Read about their great experiences on our testimonial page.

Today, we're also widening the private beta with 200 exclusive invites on TechCrunch. Head over there to grab your invite now.

This is all great news, but, there is one message that we don't want to get lost in the shuffle — we are committed to creating the best platform to store, sync, and push data in the cloud for mobile apps. Our goal is to relieve the pain of server-side development, deployment, and maintenance for mobile developers around the world. And we're moving fast towards that goal as Parse becomes more and more powerful everyday.

With that in mind, we recently released two new features: Android client push, and block support for our iOS SDK. As usual, we welcome any feedback at feedback@parse.com.