Why We Invested in Moesif

We’re pleased to share that Craft Ventures is leading the $12 million Series A for Moesif, an analytics platform for creators and users of API products, and I will be joining the board of directors.

The so-called “API Economy” is booming. Most modern companies now operate in the cloud with more flexible, microservices-based apps, which can be glued together using APIs. APIs are also the vehicle with which to exchange data or services — enabling developers to creatively solve problems by building new functional products on top of them. Companies such as Stripe, Twillio, Okta and Mapbox have commercialized APIs as their core offering while others produce APIs as secondary products for additional revenue streams.

While there is no shortage of analytics tools for traditional web and mobile products, there is a greenfield when it comes to analytics for API products, which have their own nuances around collecting and modeling metrics. Every team requires analytics on API usage for effective decision making:

• Technical teams monitor for issues and also use the data to guide product development
• Business teams leverage the data to measure customer adoption and retention
• Customer success and sales teams are on the front lines negotiating contracts based on usage data of their APIs

Developers could spend hours on tedious data processing tasks to produce these reports for every bespoke use case or client but that’s not the ideal allocation of resources. Furthermore, it’s tough to build and maintain such a robust and reliable solution in-house, especially as a company scales their headcount and customers using their APIs. To help customers with very high-volume APIs get the metrics they need without breaking the bank, Moesif has received and incorporated patents to intelligently sample API traffic resulting in an overall cost savings relative to an in-house build while empowering business teams with sophisticated analytics.

In his essay In the Digital Economy, Your Software Is Your Competitive Advantage, Jeff Lawson, founder of Twilio (one of the most successful API-first companies), advises companies to “keep developers close to customers.” For companies of scale, this is a tall order and precisely what Moesif solves for: their superpower lies in uniting all these parties onto one single platform:

• From the granular information around API calls to the complex activation funnels and customer demographics that product owners need: all are displayed on the Moesif dashboard in an easily-consumable format. This data can also be leveraged within Moesif, alongside tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, to better guide and support customers. This makes the developer experience as seamless as possible.
• The consumers of API products also love Moesif because its self-serve dashboards act as the single source of truth of their own usage. We know how critical it is for API suppliers and their users to have a shared understanding of usage and derived value when negotiating pricing in their contracts.

The proliferation of API products is a major tailwind for Moesif as they acquire customers through their developer-first motion. Customers span across sectors from regulated industries such as healthcare and fintech, to ecommerce, logistics, and enterprise software. Both fast growing startups like Tomorrow.io and Radar.io as well as industry giants like Deloitte and UPS already use Moesif across teams — trusting Moesif with their data and collaborating with their customers on the Moesif platform.

We were immediately impressed with Derric and Xing’s technical acumen and Moesif’s viral spread within enterprises. When we see product-led growth happening organically across teams and industries, we know the founders have built something awesome. With the closing of our latest fund dedicated to bottom-up SaaS companies, we are excited to support and welcome them to the Craft Keiretsu.