APIGen’s Pre-Seed Round
Message from Christopher Fitzgerald, CEO
Our first seed round led by Varana Capital marks the beginning of a partnership that will increase APIGen’s ability to carve out a space in the API management market and to bring our product to as many developers and companies as possible. As we grow, our edge will continue to lie in integrating generative AI so deeply into our platform to create a truly end-to-end product
The number of AI-based SaaS startups continues to proliferate, making it challenging to discriminate between hype and substance. Determining which platforms and tools will be here for the long run and which will be swept away in the next five years during the advancement of LLMs on the path toward AGI is increasingly difficult.
Despite the flashy and incredible feats generative AI can perform, like generating incredibly realistic videos and audio from scratch, I believe its most immediate value lies in automating mundane tasks that individuals and businesses frequently encounter. This brings me to the core value proposition of APIGen.
APIs and connectors form the backbone of the entire internet, yet the idea of creating or integrating them is often associated with substantial time, effort, and cost. This is because most APIs combine repetitive tasks—endpoint design, user authentication, code architecture—with permutations of business logic that are equally burdensome. It’s clear the need for automation in these areas is critical.
To date, API generators have gained attention for automating the repetitive aspects of API development. They typically process OpenAPI schemas or databases and produce an API shell algorithmically; they streamline a fraction of the task, and typically only for connectors (a subset of APIs). The business logic and its interaction with the structural components of the API remains largely unautomated. This is where APIGen comes in.
Given the varying complexity of APIs and their internal logic—from being simple connectors between rows of data to querying LLMs and hosting backends—the generation of business logic will offer substantial value to our customers. We believe it is the single largest untapped factor in speeding up API development, closely followed by automating API design and structure. This is exactly why we founded APIGen.
We're thrilled to launch the beta phase of our platform and to make API development easier, cheaper, and faster for everyone.
Message from Nicholas Van Landschoot, CTO
The resources and funding that Varana brings to the table will enable us to create the first truly end-to-end API creation and management solution. The API and AI markets are both saturated, but we see a distinct opportunity in combining them. Current solutions simply do not solve for the design, creation, testing, deployment, and consumption of an API. Our vision is to unify a fragmented and inefficient development process with a single platform.
We have seen the immense power of artificial intelligence in the API creation process firsthand––that being said, the future for LLMs is uncertain, and we believe in building tools that prioritize classical approaches, integrating machine learning only where it solves previously insurmountable problems. We implement this philosophy by leveraging guardrails to ensure consistent formatting and design. Besides making these tools useful now rather than five years from now when the LLMs maybe get better, this also establishes the digital infrastructure necessary for implementing even more advanced use cases with even stronger LLMs.
When developers create an API on APIGen, it can’t just be faster and easier to develop; the APIs themselves must also be superior to fully handwritten APIs at every step. This means fewer bugs, cleaner and more maintainable code, greater test coverage, enhanced performance, reduced costs in deployment and improved consumption. We still have plenty of progress to make, and we are committed to continuously improving and refining our approach to achieve these goals.
Achieving this high standard will position us within the rapidly expanding API management market, projected to reach $33 billion by 2029, with a unique edge in our API creation process that not only designs the API but also creates everything else around the API, including custom business logic and code powered with the full context of external APIs and databases.
While our main priority is locking down the quality of our API generations to ensure that APIs always work, we also have some features planned over the next few months with three overarching goals: make APIGen a unified solution for API development, increase access to data and context, and simply build something useful.
We plan to bring workflows for creating and managing databases, S3 bucket SDKs, and documentation onto our platform while, of course, maintaining the ability to connect to external resources as well.
To increase real-world usability, we know that collaboration tools are essential, and we also strongly believe that integrating with existing repositories is key. First and foremost we know that adapting to feedback from our beta users will be important in building a useful
Moving into our beta fills us with joy and we are incredibly excited to go out and build some amazing things.