Israeli company RapidAPI has announced a $9 million funding round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The same fund led RapidAPI's previous round totaling $3.5 million a year ago.
According to CEO Iddo Gino, who co-founded the company just over three years ago when he was 17, RapidAPI is now the biggest API marketplace in the world. The company has raised the current round when he is still under 21. In a podcast for startups he explains that RapidAPI "enables any programmer to find APIs, to connect to them easily, to pay for them, and to manage them afterwards. In other words, the whole subject can be managed through us from end to end for development teams."
RapidAPI defines an API (application programming interface) on its website as "a set of definitions and protocols that allow technology products and services to communicate with each other via the internet."
"API is in effect a piece of code that devlpoers can use to do certain things. For example, once, if you wanted to set up an app like Gett, you had to go to Cellcom and ask for permission to send SMS via its network. Oday, there are companies that enable you to send SMS to users, and you can simply use their code and thus considerably accelerate development."
RapidAPI plans to use the money raised to grow by a further 25 team members over the coming in order to meet the challenges facing it. "Billions of API requests go through RapidAPI every month, tens of thousands per second" said Gino. "We proved over the past year that developers and giant enterprises need our solution in order to grow. We now need to deal with the scale they bring."
More than 500,000 developers use RapidAPI's platform, with some 8,000 API connections. This represents a 16-fold in the number of customers in a year. Among these customers are Spotify, Microsoft, and NASA.
"The use of API has significantly simplified the way in which we build and connect applications. API is the new way to do business," said Andreesen Horowitz partner Martin Casado. The past year has been a significant one in API: companies like Twilio, SendGrid and Stripe have raised funds and made IPOs at valuations amounting to billions of dollars.
RapidAPI was founded by Iddo Gino and Mickey Hasalvsky. It has 30 employees in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Kiev. Investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Dov Moran, and Marius Nacht. So far, it has raised $14 million.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 13, 2018
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2018