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Apiary, which provides API testing services, announced it has received $6.8 million in Series A funding as it also launched a new API testing service.
The latest round of funding, led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from Baseline Ventures and Credo Ventures. Apiary had previously raised $1.6 million, bringing the total to $8.4 million raised to date.
The new funding comes on the heels of global customer growth and will enable Apiary to continue to grow its team and develop new features that support enterprise API design. The company’s new API testing service enables developers to continuously verify local API code changes alongside production implementation, streamlining the API testing process.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are sets of protocols that specify how software applications can interact with one another. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that 50 percent of business-to-business collaboration will take place through Web APIs by 2017, and by 2018, 75 percent of Fortune 1000 firms will offer public Web APIs. Apiary officials said the dramatic adoption of APIs is largely due to the challenges of traditional application integration strategies, which are designed for legacy client-server infrastructures and fail to meet today’s need for real-time, distributed cloud and mobile applications.
“As software ecosystems continue to grow and converge, there is a huge opportunity for technologies that can help businesses easily and effectively create robust APIs,” said David Aronoff, general partner at Flybridge, in a statement.
Apiary launched its first API development platform and API Blueprint open-source project in 2013. The software helps ease the process of designing, testing and deploying APIs by providing a workflow and infrastructure for comprehensive API design. With Apiary, developers can design and test APIs as they are being developed, to ensure that they will work as expected when deployed with software.
“As APIs shift from being byproducts of the software development process to revenue-generating products in their own right, businesses are increasingly relying on APIs to drive growth,” said Jakub Nesetril, CEO of Apiary,” in a statement. “Apiary is helping businesses harness the power of APIs in today’s interconnected, software-driven, multiplatform world. Our sole mission is to provide developers with a platform to easily create unbelievably powerful APIs. The new capital will fund this mission through radical innovation and the accelerated delivery of cutting-edge tools to the world’s largest footprint of API developers.”
Apiary helps reduce the time and cost of creating APIs and also helps open new channels for business growth by providing links between technology platforms, such as on-premises, cloud, Web, mobile, and Internet-of-things (IoT).
“APIs are a critical component of business infrastructure, not only from a technological perspective but also for business development and sales growth,” said Corey Scobie, vice president of Open Platform at Akamai, which uses the Apiary service. “Our API-centric strategy relies on robust APIs that address our business customers’ unique pain points. The Apiary platform enables us to streamline the process of creating reliable APIs right out of the gate, reducing the time and overhead required to deliver an API to our customers and virtually eliminating the risk of creating a broken or faulty API. With Apiary, we’ve scaled from 10 to more than thirty APIs—while reducing the associated costs and accelerating overall business growth—and plan to create more than 100 APIs within the next 18 months.”
Apiary Raises $6.8M, Launches New API Testing Service
Apiary also unveiled a new API testing service that provides a single destination for continuous API testing in the development process, eliminating the manual creation of verification tests and reducing the time and resources spent managing external testing applications.
The HTTP testing framework for APIs, previously known as “Dredd,” started as a sponsored open-source project on GitHub and was later integrated into Apiary’s collaborative API development platform after gaining attention from developers.
The new testing service enables users to test API specifications with the backend implementation from their local environment as well as within Continuous Integration, a testing framework for local development. Apiary said local development testing with Continuous Integration for API specification can be a tedious multi-step process requiring knowledge of command line tools and service integration, forcing developers to write the tests manually, resulting in at least one line of code for each key. The new testing integration automatically tests everything in API Blueprint against the implementation.
“Software developers struggle to create robust APIs that enable the seamless, efficient sharing of data and information between software applications,” said Nesetril. “As businesses around the world increasingly rely on APIs to connect information systems, it is critically important to ensure quality—a faulty, buggy API or an improper integration can break vital information links between software, resulting in lost users or business. Apiary’s new testing service—which has been used and iterated upon by the open source community over the past year—changes the way developers create APIs by enabling them to test API fidelity and reliability in live environments in real-time. As a result, API developers can ensure that APIs will work properly the first time, every time.”
Continuous integration significantly reduces integration problems and allows a team to move faster and ship higher quality code, said Paul Biggar, CEO of CircleCI, which provides continuous integration and deployment services. “With Apiary’s new testing support, API bugs are caught early and prevented from reaching customers, enabling businesses to get to market faster and make their customers happy,” he noted.