Google's Schmidt, Amazon's Bezos Help Fund Mashape API Marketplace

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt join an impressive group of investors in Mashape, a startup delivering a marketplace for cloud APIs.

Mashape, a San Francisco startup focused on building a marketplace for APIs, has announced $1.5 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Eric Schmidt and some of the industry's top venture capital firms.

Mashape is a marketplace for cloud APIs. The company, whose tagline is "A place to easily discover, manage and hack badass APIs," says it will use the funding to "aggressively hire creative software designers and accelerate the product development and boost the growth."

In a Sept. 6 blog post penned by the Mashape co-founders-Augusto Marietti, CEO; Marco Palladino, CTO; and Mike Zonca, chief architect-the team could hardly contain their excitement over the funding. The Mashape team said:

"We are thrilled to announce $1.5M in seed funding from a stunning group of investors, both institutional and angels. The round was led by NEA, with a strong participation from Index Ventures (which is on fire nowadays). In addition Charles River Ventures and Ignition Partners have participated in the syndicate as well. The angel side is also impressive for us, with Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, as well as Erik Rannala (Admob, Heroku, 99design), Russell Siegelman (KPCB and Microsoft) and Rick Webb (TheBarbarianGroup) among many."

The funding also will help Mashape provide better services for its users and move from a "garage style" company to something more serious, the company said.

"I believe we're just at the beginning of our road. I believe the market of APIs just started to take a shape," Marietti said.

"We have a very long-term vision, we believe APIs will play a major role in the world of Information Technology for the years to come-the interesting part is that even companies not related to Internet as a core business are now integrating APIs into their products, such Toyota or Nike," the Mashape blog reads. "If we take a look into those startups that have more than 30 people, we notice that most of them are hiring 2 new positions: API evangelist and API engineer. Those positions would never have existed 3 years ago. A new market is coming."

Moreover, on its site, Mashape further describes itself as a frustration-free online marketplace for developers who want to consume or distribute an API of any kind of service. "We provide traction to any API that runs somewhere on a server," the company says.

Mashape APIs include jValidator, a Java Enterprise Data Validator. It's an open-source server for the validation and processing of data stream, the Mashape site says.