My initial thoughts were that Meteor would be more widely deployed in production than Firebase would. But it also seemed like Firebase had a more obvious path to profitability than Meteor.

Given the current VC market and the rapidly evolving landscape of (so called) real-time services, I'm surprised they raised such a small sum. I would have thought if you were going to go the VC route, you might as well go all in and raise a massive chunk.

With a (somewhat conservative) estimate of $10K a month per engineer and $1.1M to spend, a team of 8 engineers would give you a runway of just under 14 months. I think you would want more runway than that.