Israeli-based application program interface (API) company RapidAPI launched today and announced a $3.5 million seed round from venture capital and private equipment firm Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Green bay Advisors, and FundersClub also participated in the funding.
Martin Casado, who is widely considered the father of software-defined networking (SDN), played a key role in Andreessen’s funding of RapidAPI. Casado was the founder and CTO of Nicira Networks, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. He served as VMware’s CTO for four years and is now a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz.
“I feel like the first time we met Martin, he and the rest of the firm really understood how tech is shifting every aspect of our lives today,” says Iddo Gino, RapidAPI CEO and founder.
Because the majority of applications are siloed, they have trouble sharing similar information that can look very different at face value, Gino says. RapidAPI is essentially a library of public APIs that allows applications to consume and share APIs, enabling new combinations of technology with a single set of standards.
From a developer’s perspective, each API works completely differently. What RapidAPI does is make APIs act and talk the same so developers can choose which one they want solely based on its function as opposed to what language it’s written in. RapidAPI’s platform is open sourced so any developer can access or contribute to its library of over 200 APIs.
RapidAPI also offers an enterprise version of its API platform for companies that want to work on their internal APIs, privately. “It’s especially important for enterprises using microservices that want to weave those together in a cohesive way,” Gino says. Ebay, one of its beta customers, used the platform to update its older APIs internally.
While there are a lot of tools out there made for building, customizing, and testing APIs, they still have their own format and language making it hard to truly know its function until it’s used. RapidAPI goes on top of all of that and strips it down so all developers see is its function when picking an API.
RapidAPI currently has 25,000 developers on its open source platform, and plans to use the funding to increase that number as well as the number of APIs in its library. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, has offices in San Francisco, and employs 16 people.