A16Z Leads RapidAPI’s $9 Million Series A To Scale Up API Marketplace

RapidAPI announced a $9 million Series A round this morning. The San Francisco-based company hosts a marketplace that helps software engineers discover and integrate external APIs into their software,.

The capital event was led by Martin Casado at Andreessen Horowitz who has joined RapidAPI’s board of directors. Participating investors in the round include SV Angel, Green Bay Capital, and Tony Jamous, the founder and CEO of Nexmo, which was acquired by Vonage for $250 million in June 2016.

In prior funding, RapidAPI raised $3.5 million in a seed round, also led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company confirms that, between the two rounds, it has raised $12.5 million in venture funding.

In 2017, RapidAPI merged with Mashape, a similar API search platform.

Why It Matters

Connectivity continues to be a major through-line in technology startups, perhaps now more than ever. People use applications and platforms to connect to each other; applications connect to a network through layers of software and hardware; and, more often than not, applications connect to other applications, databases, and platforms through application programming interfaces (APIs for short).

There are open APIs for just about everything. They help software developers do more faster by letting them easily integrate outside software functionality into their own work. But one of the problems with having a virtually limitless set of options available is, of course, discoverability and organization (or lack thereof, in this case).

RapidAPI is certainly not the first or only company out there trying to catalog the world’s APIs. For example, ProgrammableWeb, founded in 2005, was an early entrant to the space. It was acquired by MuleSoft in 2013. Newer, community-contributed efforts like APIList have also cropped up as of late.

But RapidAPI is among the fastest-growing marketplaces for open APIs out there today, with over 8,000 APIs listed and 400 billion API calls made each month, according to a statement from the company.

As more companies look to integrate more data and functionality into their platforms, and as programming increasingly becomes a mainstream skill, the demand for APIs and the sites and services that organize them will only continue to grow.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias