Our Investment in Speakeasy — Next-Gen API DevEx Platform

VC Astasia Myers’ perspectives on machine learning, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, open source, and security. Sign up here.

We are seeing a profound shift of software development moving to an API-first approach. From microservices to API solutions, APIs have become the foundational building block for building applications. Unfortunately, it is hard for API producers to build a Stripe-like developer experience without expensive platform engineering. At the same time API access patterns are rapidly evolving, and it can be challenging for API consumers to effectively integrate APIs.

For API producers, one of the first steps to creating a usable API is generating a Software Developer Kit (SDK), which enables API consumers to dramatically simplify integrating with an API. Creating an SDK can be arduous. Today there are two approaches. One option is hand-rolling SDKs, which can be expensive to create from a time and resources perspective. It also distracts from core product development. The second option is using an open source generator maintained by volunteers. These generators are often not well supported and generate low quality SDKs and are not customizable. Moreover, with the explosion in the number of languages and runtimes that need specific SDKs, teams are constantly needing to create new SDKs or manually maintain the existing ones. It’s a lot of manual work.

Without an SDK, API consumers have to manually handle the API integration process. This is time-consuming and error-prone. If an SDK exists, but is functioning poorly or is out-of-date, it significantly hurts the consumer’s ability to adopt and leverage the API.

SDKs are necessary for creating a great API Developer Experience (DevEx), but it can be toilsome. Enter Speakeasy, which creates all the developer surfaces an API needs in minutes starting with SDKs and Terraform providers.

Sagar Batchu and Simon Yu, who have direct experience building API-first products at LiveRamp and Safegraph, founded Speakeasy. As API product builders, they had first hand knowledge of how the underlying API lifecycle is broken. Their insights led them to build Speakeasy so that any API can have great DevEx out-of-the-box.

With Speakeasy, API developers can generate all the critical interfaces that make integrating with an API easy — from native language client SDKs and HashiCorp Terraform Providers to CLIs and eventually natural language access for any API. With Speakeasy’s Managed SDKs product, API producers just provide their existing API documentation or specs . Using code parsing and AI, Speakeasy validates the API, creates idiomatic SDKs, and publishes it automatically to package managers. Importantly, SDKs are rebuilt after every API change so are always in sync. The process of SDK development goes from weeks to minutes, saving developers significant time. With Speakeasy’s Terraform Provider Generation, API producers for the first time can easily create and maintain terraform providers from an API spec directly.

Speakeasy’s DevEx platform also enables API producers to offer advanced self-service capabilities to end users, such as authentication, request replay and capture and API schema insight and evolution. Speakeasy is seeing strong momentum with users including Airbyte, Medallion, Codat, Sardine, Writer, among others.

Today, we are honored to announce that Quiet Capital led Speakeasy’s $3.3M preseed round. We are also excited to be joined by GV who led the $7.6M seed and angels Todd Berman (Attentive), Clint Sharp (Cribl), Amit Agarwal (Datadog), and Ameet Patel. We are incredibly thrilled to support Sagar, Simon, and the entire Speakeasy team to provide tooling to make it radically simple to create and consume any API.

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