Building Speakeasy
Speakeasy's $15M Series A
Sagar Batchu
October 30, 2024
TL;DR
We’ve raised $15M to revolutionize REST API development. With this latest round of investment, we’re expanding our product offerings, accelerating our roadmap, and growing our exceptional team 🚀
If software is eating the world, APIs are the knives and forks. They’re not just connecting systems: they’re fundamentally reshaping how we build, deploy, and scale software.
Slack aside, service-based architectures are how engineering teams are communicating with one another internally. Meanwhile, every B2B SaaS is working to transform into an API-based company and offer programmatic access to their products.
These trends have made APIs the #1 source of web traffic and they’re growing faster than any other type. With the rise of AI, we’re on the cusp of an even more dramatic surge in traffic as machine-to-machine communication explodes.
But against this backdrop of rapid API growth, the tools and practices for building quality, reliable APIs haven’t kept pace. This growing gap is creating a bottleneck that could choke the next wave of software innovation. Unless we invest in better API development solutions, we risk stifling the very progress that APIs have enabled.
No more API embarrassment
In our conversations with countless engineering teams, we’ve discovered a common but rarely discussed emotion surrounding their APIs: embarrassment. It’s consistent across companies of all sizes and industries.
Teams composed of brilliant engineers find themselves disappointed that their company’s APIs don’t represent the best of their team’s abilities. They’re embarrassed by:
- Documentation that’s perpetually out of date
- Inadvertent breaking changes that slip into production
- Inconsistencies in naming conventions and functionality
- SDKs that lag behind API updates, if they exist at all
There’s a disconnect between the quality these teams aspire to and the reality of their APIs.
Why? Are developers inherently bad at designing and building APIs?
We don’t think so.
The root of the problem lies with the tools available. Even the most gifted craftsman needs the appropriate tools to build something they’re proud of. And unfortunately the API tooling ecosystem is stuck in 2005.
Why we’re building Speakeasy
We want to make it trivially easy for every developer to build great APIs. Said another way, no more API embarrassment. To make that dream a reality, we’re building the API tools we’ve always wanted: a platform to handle the heavy lifting of API development to unburden developers to focus on refining the business logic.
Here’s the future we want to create:
- Build: You use your favorite API framework to build your API. Speakeasy helps you make sure that your API matches industry & internal best practices.
- Test: You develop new API features. Speakeasy automates API testing to make sure no unintentional breaking changes get shipped.
- Distribute: You release your API. Speakeasy automatically generates the SDKs that make your API a joy to integrate.
Why we raised money
We partnered with FPV Ventures to lead our $15M Series A funding round, with continued support from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Quiet Capital. Our investors, alongside angels like Søren Bramer Schmidt (CEO at Prisma), Clint Sharp (Co-founder at Cribl), and Arpit Patel (CCO at Traceable), have provided us with the fuel we need to revolutionize API development for engineers everywhere.
We asked Wesley Chan, Managing Partner at FPV Ventures, why he invested:
“The Speakeasy team’s past experience building enterprise APIs has given them profound insight into, and empathy for, the struggles engineering teams are facing. They are building a platform that will not only address existing inefficiencies in API development but anticipates future challenges in the ecosystem. But what ultimately convinced us to lead their round was the overwhelming feedback from their user base. Teams aren’t just using the platform; they’re enthusiastically championing it, which speaks volumes about Speakeasy’s ability to deliver real value and an exceptional experience.”
Of course, what ultimately matters isn’t what investors think, it’s what developers choose. This year, we’ve seen nearly 3,000 users generate 7,250 SDKs. That’s a 575% increase in companies investing in their API’s tooling. From fast-growing innovators like Vercel and Mistral AI to established giants like Verizon, to hobby projects by solo devs, engineers are using Speakeasy to accelerate their API development and adoption.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far, but we can also say with certainty that we are only getting started. With this new funding, we’re expanding our product offerings, accelerating our roadmap, and growing our exceptional team across San Francisco and London. We have ambitious plans to revolutionize contract testing, API creation, and webhook management.
Ready to supercharge your API lifecycle? Let’s talk.
Sagar & Simon, Co-founders, Speakeasy
