Speakeasy Supercharges API Creation and Consumption and Closed $7.6 Million in Seed Funding Led by GV Last Month, Bringing the Total Raised to $11 Million

By Globe Newswire Published on June 29, 2023, 21:04 IST

Speakeasy Co-Founders

Speakeasy

First Platform That Creates All the Interfaces an API Needs in Minutes

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today Speakeasy, the API infrastructure company, emerged from stealth with the first platform that creates all the interfaces an API needs in minutes. These interfaces dramatically simplify how end user developers access the API – unlocking access to new developer communities, accelerating adoption and saving both API producers and consumers significant time and cost.

“Every company today has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to providing great API developer experiences. Speakeasy enables great API DevEx out-of-the-box, resulting in huge top-line returns to API adoption and bottom-line returns to focus, time and cost,” said Sagar Batchu, co-founder and CEO of Speakeasy.

APIs are the fundamental communication rails that underpin how software works: API consumers use them every day to interact with internal or external services. Postman’s State of the API 2023 report* illustrates how hard it is to build great, developer-friendly APIs and estimates that 70% of API producers’ time is spent on activities other than building the API itself.

API producers want to offer intuitive, friction-free API developer experiences but there aren’t existing out-of-the-box solutions on the market today. They have to design, build and maintain all the components from scratch themselves or cobble point solutions together – which is incredibly time-consuming and can even be prohibitive for most companies. This results in poor developer experience for API consumers and low API usage.

Speakeasy’s co-founders Sagar Batchu (CEO) and Simon Yu (Chief Product Officer) experienced this problem firsthand at both startups and large enterprises. This led them to found the company in 2022 so companies don’t have to reinvent the wheel in order to provide great API developer experiences.

With Speakeasy, API developers can generate all the critical interfaces that make integrating with an API easy – from native language client SDKs, HashiCorp Terraform Providers and CLIs to LLM Agents that enable natural language API access – further enabling new discovery and access patterns for end users and developers. Speakeasy 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.

Today Speakeasy is launching two products on its platform:

Managed SDKs: Speakeasy manages the entire SDK creation workflow. API producers just provide an Open API spec. Speakeasy uses AI to validate and enhance the spec, creates SDKs in the most popular languages, and publishes automatically to package managers. It takes minutes to set up, and SDKs are updated every time the spec changes – saving developers significant time. Managed SDKs is generally available today.
“Customers are extremely excited to use Airbyte’s Cloud APIs, thanks to the world-class developer experience that Speakeasy provides. Through Speakeasy, we can offer client SDKs that support rapid API integrations and a powerful developer portal that enables our API users to self-serve critical needs from API keys to troubleshooting failed requests,” said Michel Tricot, CEO of Airbyte.

Terraform Provider Generation: HashiCorp’s Terraform is a popular open source tool that lets developers define and manage infrastructure as code. Terraform providers enable Terraform to access third-party services’ APIs – similar to how SDKs act as an interface to an API. Writing a Terraform provider is a complex, manual task however. With Speakeasy, API producers can, for the first time, easily create and maintain Terraform providers from an OpenAPI specification – dramatically reducing engineering burden, while unlocking an entirely new developer community. Terraform Provider Generation is in beta today.
“Speakeasy’s unique ability to generate Terraform providers from our existing API spec allowed us to take a huge leap in our own product go-to-market. Using Speakeasy means we don’t need to invest in hiring a team of specialist engineers to build and maintain a provider from scratch, instead allowing us to focus on building our core product,” said Viljami Kuosmanen, head of engineering at epilot.

“Speakeasy empowers every API producer to create amazing developer experiences. Our Managed SDK and Terraform Provider Generation products simplify API producers’ lives by turning a time-consuming, complex, manual process into a single automated workflow. And API consumers love the high-quality, feature-rich SDKs that make integrations easy,“ said Simon Yu, co-founder and CPO at Speakeasy.

Additional Resources:

Follow along during Speakeasy’s inaugural “Feature Week” taking place July 10-14 for deep-dives into key product features and benefits: https://www.speakeasyapi.dev/featureweek
Read the “Introducing Speakeasy” blog: https://www.speakeasyapi.dev/post/introducing-speakeasy/

Speakeasy Raises $11 Million Funding from GV, Quiet Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Flex Capital, StoryHouse Ventures and Angels
Last month Speakeasy closed $7.6 million in seed funding, led by GV with participation from Quiet Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Flex Capital and StoryHouse Ventures. Last year Speakeasy raised $3.3 million in a pre-seed round led by Quiet Capital. Angel investors include Bucky Moore (Partner at Kleiner Perkins), Jordan Segall (Principal at Redpoint Ventures), Amit Agarwal (president of Datadog), Clint Sharp (co-founder and CEO of Cribl) and Todd Berman (CTO of Attentive). Speakeasy plans to use the funding to invest further in its platform and to grow its go-to-market team.

“The API economy has boomed over the past decade and implementing and adopting APIs is complex and manual for both API creators and consumers. The Speakeasy founders have deep domain expertise for tackling this developer experience problem. We’re thrilled to work with Sagar Batchu, Simon Yu and the Speakeasy team as they continue to carve out a new category in the API market,” said Crystal Huang, general partner at GV.

“Sagar and Simon standout as founders because they have direct experience building API-first products. They saw firsthand the profound shift of software development moving to an API-first approach and the toil developers experience integrating APIs. Their insights led them to build Speakeasy which accelerates the shift to this new reality through a unique platform that addresses the root cause complexity of leveraging APIs. Their vision to make every company developer-friendly through best-in-class API DevEx is incredibly exciting,” said Astasia Myers, partner at Quiet Capital.