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Postman raises $50 million to grow its API development platform
Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simplify development, tests and management of APIs through its platform, has raised $50 million in a new round to scale its business.
The Series B for the startup, which began its journey in India, was led by CRV and included participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners . The startup, with offices in India and San Francisco, closed its Series A financing round four years ago and has raised $58 million to date.
Postman offers a development environment which a developer or a firm could use to build, publish, document, design, monitor, test and debug their APIs. Postman, like some other startups such as RapidAPI, also maintains a marketplace to offer APIs for quick integration with other popular services.
The startup was co-founded by Abhinav Asthana, a former intern at Yahoo . Asthana was frustrated with how APIs were an afterthought for many developers, as they usually got around to building them in the eleventh hour. Additionally, developers were relying on their own workflows and there was no organized platform that could be used by many, he explained in an interview with TechCrunch.
Even big software firms have not looked into this space yet, and many have instead become a customer of Postman. “We are solving a fundamental problem for the technology landscape. Big companies tend to be slower as they have many other things on their plate,” said Asthana.
Five years later, Postman has grown significantly. More than 7 million users and 300,000 companies, including Microsoft, Twitter, Best Buy, AMC Theaters, PayPal, Shopify, BigCommerce and DocuSign today use Postman’s platform.
The modern software development relies heavily on APIs as more businesses begin to talk with one another. According to research firm Gartner, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue will be generated through services enabled by APIs by 2023, up from 15% in 2018.
Asthana said Postman intends to use the fresh capital to scale its startup, products and grow its team. “We are scaling rapidly across all dimensions. There are many use cases that we still want to address over the coming months. We will also experiment with sales and invest in improving user experience,” he added.
Postman offers some of its services in limited capacity for free to users. For the rest, it charges between $8 to $18 per user to its customers. That’s how the company generates revenue. Asthana declined to share the financial performance of the startup, but said its customer base was “growing phenomenally.”
Postman said CRV general partner Devdutt Yellurkar has joined its board of directors.
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SendBird snags additional $50M for messaging API tool, as it extends Series B to $102M
SendBird, a startup that enables developers to add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code, announced a secondary Series B investment of $50 million today. This additional funding comes on top of the $52 million, the company raised in February.
The new money was led by Tiger Global Management, with significant participation from Iconiq, the firm that led the initial Series B round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $120 million, according to Crunchbase data.
This is a huge investment for a Series B-level company, and what appears to be driving such a large influx of cash is a fast-growing market with tremendous demand for user-to-user messaging inside apps. By offering this as an API service, developers can drop the capability into their apps without having to build it from scratch. It’s a similar value proposition as Twilio for communications or Stripe for payments.
As SendBird CEO John Kim told us in the first part of the Series B investment in February, his company is aiming to make it simple for developers to add in-app messaging:
We are a very flexible, fully customizable, white label messaging capability. We come with a fully managed infrastructure. So basically, you can log into any mobile applications or websites out there, and use our messaging capability.
Kim says today’s additional money comes at a time when his company is accelerating its go-to-market strategy. “Starting from marketing and sales, we are building the go-to-market engine to scale our global presence by hiring leaders in key areas of the business and building teams around those leaders. To accelerate this process, we’re working with our new investors for Series B, who have made many investments in our target markets and built strong connections there,” Kim told TechCrunch.
Founded in South Korea in 2013, SendBird has 98 employees, with headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. It was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class.
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Apigee jumps on hybrid bandwagon with new API for hybrid environments
This year at Google Cloud Next, the theme is all about supporting hybrid environments, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apigee, the API company it bought in 2016 for $265 million, is also getting into the act. Today, Apigee announced the beta of Apigee Hybrid, a new product designed for hybrid environments.
Amit Zavery, who recently joined Google Cloud after many years at Oracle, and Nandan Sridhar, describe the new product in a joint blog post as “a new deployment option for the Apigee API management platform that lets you host your runtime anywhere—in your data center or the public cloud of your choice.”
As with Anthos, the company’s approach to hybrid management announced earlier today, the idea is to have a single way to manage your APIs no matter where you choose to run them.
“With Apigee hybrid, you get a single, full-featured API management solution across all your environments, while giving you control over your APIs and the data they expose and ensuring a unified strategy across all APIs in your enterprise,” Zavery and Sridhar wrote in the blog post announcing the new approach.
The announcement is part of an overall strategy by the company to support a customer’s approach to computing across a range of environments, often referred to as hybrid cloud. In the Cloud Native world, the idea is to present a single fabric to manage your deployments, regardless of location.
This appears to be an extension of that idea, which makes sense, given that Google was the first company to develop and open-source Kubernetes, which is at the forefront of containerization and Cloud Native computing. While this isn’t pure Cloud Native computing, it is keeping true to its ethos and it fits in the scope of Google Cloud’s approach to computing in general, especially as it is being defined at this year’s conference.
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Mailgun changes hands again as Thoma Bravo buys majority stake
Mailgun, an email API delivery service, announced today that it was selling a majority stake in the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The companies did not share terms, but this is the second owner in the company’s eight-year history.
Mailgun provides API services for building email functionality into applications. It has more than 150,000 customers using its APIs, according to data provided by the company.
In a blog post announcing the investment, CEO William Conway said the new money should help the company expand its capabilities and accelerate the product roadmap, a common refrain from companies about to be acquired.
“We will be investing millions in the development of products you can use to enhance your deliverability, gain more insights into your emails and deliver an unparalleled experience for your customers. We’re also doubling down on customer success and enablement to ensure our customers have exactly what they need to scale their communications,” Conway wrote in the blog post.
The company, which was founded in 2010 and was a part of the Y Combinator Winter 2011 cohort, has had a complex history. Rackspace acquired it in 2012 and held onto it until 2017, when it spun out into a private company. At that point, Turn/River, another private equity firm, invested $50 million in the company. After today’s deal, Turn/River will maintain a minority ownership stake in Mailgun.
Mailgun typically competes with companies like Mailchimp and SendGrid. Thoma Bravo has a history of buying enterprise software companies. Most recently, it bought a majority stake in enterprise software company Apttus. It also has investments in SolarWinds, SailPoint and Blue Point Systems.
Thoma Bravo did not respond to a request for comment before publishing.
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Salesforce Commerce Cloud updates keep us shopping with AI-fueled APIs
As people increasingly use their mobile phones and other devices to shop, it has become imperative for vendors to improve the shopping experience, making it as simple as possible, given the small footprint. One way to do that is using artificial intelligence. Today, Salesforce announced some AI-enhanced APIs designed to keep us engaged as shoppers.
For starters, the company wants to keep you shopping. That means providing an intelligent recommendation engine. If you searched for a particular jacket, you might like these similar styles, or this scarf and gloves. That’s fairly basic as shopping experiences go, but Salesforce didn’t stop there. It’s letting developers embed this ability to recommend products in any app, whether that’s maps, social or mobile.
That means shopping recommendations could pop up anywhere developers think it makes sense, like on your maps app. Whether consumers see this as a positive thing, Salesforce says when you add intelligence to the shopping experience, it increases sales anywhere from 7-16 percent, so however you feel about it, it seems to be working.
The company also wants to make it simple to shop. Instead of entering a multi-faceted search, as has been the traditional way of shopping in the past — footwear, men’s, sneakers, red — you can take a picture of a sneaker (or anything you like) and the visual search algorithm should recognize it and make recommendations based on that picture. It reduces data entry for users, which is typically a pain on the mobile device, even if it has been simplified by checkboxes.
Salesforce has also made inventory availability as a service, allowing shoppers to know exactly where the item they want is available in the world. If they want to pick up in-store that day, it shows where the store is on a map and could even embed that into your ridesharing app to indicate exactly where you want to go. The idea is to create this seamless experience between consumer desire and purchase.
Finally, Salesforce has added some goodies to make developers happy, too, including the ability to browse the Salesforce API library and find the ones that make the most sense for what they are creating. This includes code snippets to get started. It may not seem like a big deal, but as companies the size of Salesforce increase their API capabilities (especially with the MuleSoft acquisition), it’s harder to know what’s available. The company has also created a sandboxing capability to let developers experiment and build capabilities with these APIs in a safe way.
The basis of Commerce Cloud is Demandware, the company Salesforce acquired two years ago for $2.8 billion. Salesforce’s intelligence platform is called Einstein. In spite of its attempt to personify the technology, it’s really about bringing artificial intelligence across the Salesforce platform of products, as it has with today’s API announcements.
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Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage
Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.
The investment was led by Merus Capital, with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, whose investments include Cruise Automation, which was sold to GM in 2016 for $1 billion.
Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”
Heat map showing API usage by region. Screenshot: Moesif
The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.
Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, which use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often and, with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.
The product was released last year, and Gilling says his company already has 2,000 customers, which includes both the free and paid tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and fintech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and DHL.
While the company currently consists of two founders and one employee, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months, including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.
Moesif was founded in late 2016, and the founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.
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With MuleSoft in fold, Salesforce gains access to data wherever it lives
When Salesforce bought MuleSoft last spring for the tidy sum of $6.5 billion, it looked like money well spent for the CRM giant. After all, it was providing a bridge between the cloud and the on-prem data center and that was a huge missing link for a company with big ambitions like Salesforce.
When you want to rule the enterprise, you can’t be limited by where data lives and you need to be able to share information across disparate systems. Partly that’s a simple story of enterprise integration, but on another level it’s purely about data. Salesforce introduced its intelligence layer, dubbed Einstein, at Dreamforce in 2016.
With MuleSoft in the fold, it’s got access to data cross systems wherever it lives, in the cloud or on-prem. Data is the fuel of artificial intelligence, and Salesforce has been trying desperately to get more data for Einstein since its inception.
It lost out on LinkedIn to Microsoft, which flexed its financial muscles and reeled in the business social network for $26.5 billion a couple of years ago. It’s undoubtedly a rich source of data that the company longed for. Next, it set its sights on Twitter (although Twitter was ultimately never sold, of course). After board and stockholder concerns, the company walked away.
Each of these forays was all about the data; frustrated, Salesforce went back to the drawing board. While MuleSoft did not supply the direct cache of data that a social network would have, it did provide a neat way for them to get at backend data sources — the very type of data that matters most to its enterprise customers.
Today, they have extended that notion beyond pure data access to a graph. You can probably see where this is going. The idea of a graph, the connections between say a buyer and the things they tend to buy or a person on a social network and people they tend to interact with, can be extended even to the network/API level, and that is precisely the story that Salesforce is trying to tell this week at the Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco.
Visualizing connections in a data integration network in MuleSoft. Screenshot: Salesforce/MuleSoft
Maureen Fleming, program vice president for integration and process automation research at IDC, says that it is imperative that organizations view data as a strategic asset and act accordingly. “Very few companies are getting all the value from their data as they should be, as it is locked up in various applications and systems that aren’t designed to talk to each other. Companies who are truly digitally capable will be able to connect these disparate data sources, pull critical business-level data from these connections, and make informed business decisions in a way that delivers competitive advantage,” Fleming explained in a statement.
Configuring data connections on MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. Gif: Salesforce/MuleSoft
It’s hard to underestimate the value of this type of data is to Salesforce, which has already put MuleSoft to work internally to help build the new Customer 360 product announced today. It can point to how it’s providing this very type of data integration to which Fleming is referring on its own product set.
Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, says that for his company all of this is ultimately about enhancing the customer experience. You need to be able to stitch together these different computing environments and data silos to make that happen.
“In the short term, [customer] infrastructure is often fragmented. They often have some legacy applications on premise, they’ll have some cloud applications like Salesforce, but some infrastructure in on Amazon or Google and Azure, and to actually transform the customer experience, they need to bring all this data together. And so it’s a really a unique time for integration technologies, like MuleSoft because it enables you to create a seamless customer experience, no matter where that data lives, and that means you don’t need to wait for infrastructure to be perfect before you can transform your customer experience.”
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Twilio’s contact center products just got more analytical with Ytica acquisition
Twilio, a company best known for supplying a communications APIs for developers has a product called Twilio Flex for building sophisticated customer service applications on top of Twilio’s APIs. Today, it announced it was acquiring Ytica (pronounced Why-tica) to provide an operational and analytical layer on top of the customer service solution.
The companies would not discuss the purchase price, but Twilio indicated it does not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its “results, operations or financial condition.” In other words, it probably didn’t cost much.
Ytica, which is based in Prague, has actually been a partner with Twilio for some time, so coming together in this fashion really made a lot of sense, especially as Twilio has been developing Flex.
Twilio Flex is an app platform for contact centers, which offers a full stack of applications and allows users to deliver customer support over multiple channels, Al Cook, general manager of Twilio Flex explained. “Flex deploys like SaaS, but because it’s built on top of APIs, you can reach in and change how Flex works,” he said. That is very appealing, especially for larger operations looking for a flexible, cloud-based solution without the baggage of on-prem legacy products.
What the product was lacking, however, was a native way to manage customer service representatives from within the application, and understand through analytics and dashboards, how well or poorly the team was doing. Having that ability to measure the effectiveness of the team becomes even more critical the larger the group becomes, and Cook indicated some Flex users are managing enormous groups with 10,000-20,000 employees.
Ytica provides a way to measure the performance of customer service staff, allowing management to monitor and intervene and coach when necessary. “It made so much sense to join together as one team. They have huge experience in the contact center, and a similar philosophy to build something customizable and programmable in the cloud,” Cook said.
While Ytica works with other vendors beyond Twilio, CEO Simon Vostrý says that they will continue to support those customers, even as they join the Twilio family. “We can run Flex and can continue to run this separately. We have customers running on other SaaS platforms, and we will continue to support them,” he said.
The company will remain in Prague and become a Twilio satellite office. All 14 employees are expected to join the Twilio team and Cook says plans are already in the works to expand the Prague team.
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Nylas scores $16M Series B to expand email API tool
Nylas, a startup that helps developers integrate email content into applications via an API, announced a $16 million Series B today led by Spark Capital.
Other investors joining in included Slack Fund, Industry Ventures, and ScaleUp along with existing investors 8VC, Great Oaks Capital, Rubicon Venture Capital and John Chambers’ personal fund. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $30 million.
The Nylas API works in a similar way to Stripe or Twilio, but instead of helping developers connect to payments or communications with a couple of lines of code, Nylas helps them connect to email, calendar and contact information. The idea behind any API like this is to give developers who lack expertise in a particular area outside the core purpose of their application, easy access to a particular type of functionality.
Company CEO Gleb Polyakov says that prior to Nylas, there really wasn’t an effective way to connect to email systems without a lot of technical wrangling. “Every person who is using the Internet has an email address, and there’s an immense amount of data that lives in the mail box, in the calendar, in your address book. And up until now, companies have been unable to effectively use that data,” he told TechCrunch.
It seems like a must-have kind of ability to connect to this type of information from any application, but most companies have shied away from a comprehensive approach because it’s hard to do, says company co-founder and CTO Christine Spang.
“We have essentially built adapters for the native protocols for each email system: Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, open source IMap servers and all the different extensions that are available on the different IMap implementations. And the key part is that with these adapters, we can talk to backend providers like Google, GoDaddy and Yahoo, Spang explained.
Photo: Nylas
This capability could be useful for developers in lots of scenarios such as pulling data for a CRM tool from an email exchange between a salesperson and a customer, or to coordinate meetings around the calendars of several individuals and an open meeting room that works for all of their schedules.
The company, which has been around for five years, currently has 35 employees with offices in New York and San Francisco. With the new funding, they expect to double that number by the end of the year, as it adds engineering and builds out its sales and marketing team. While much of the marketing up to now has been inbound from developers, they want to expand their customer base by marketing directly to companies.
It currently counts 200 customers and thousands of developers using the product. Customers include Comcast, Hyundai, News Corp, Salesloft and Dialpad.
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6 million users had installed third-party Twitter clients
Twitter tried to downplay the impact deactivating its legacy APIs would have on its community and the third-party Twitter clients preferred by many power users by saying that “less than 1%” of Twitter developers were using these old APIs. Twitter is correct in its characterization of the size of this developer base, but it’s overlooking millions of third-party app users in the process. According to data from Sensor Tower, six million App Store and Google Play users installed the top five third-party Twitter clients between January 2014 and July 2018.
Over the past year, these top third-party apps were downloaded 500,000 times.
This data is largely free of reinstalls, the firm also said.
The top third-party Twitter apps users installed over the past three-and-a-half years have included: Twitterrific, Echofon, TweetCaster, Tweetbot and Ubersocial.
Of course, some portion of those users may have since switched to Twitter’s native app for iOS or Android, or they may run both a third-party app and Twitter’s own app in parallel.
Even if only some of these six million users remain, they represent a small, vocal and — in some cases, prominent — user base. It’s one that is very upset right now, too. And for a company that just posted a loss of one million users during its last earnings, it seems odd that Twitter would not figure out a way to accommodate this crowd, or even bring them on board its new API platform to make money from them.
Twitter, apparently, was weighing data and facts, not user sentiment and public perception, when it made this decision. But some things have more value than numbers on a spreadsheet. They are part of a company’s history and culture. Of course, Twitter has every right to blow all that up and move on, but that doesn’t make it the right decision.
To be fair, Twitter is not lying when it says this is a small group. The third-party user base is tiny compared with Twitter’s native app user base. During the same time that six million people were downloading third-party apps, the official Twitter app was installed a whopping 560 million times across iOS and Android. That puts the third-party apps’ share of installs at about 1.1 percent of the total.
That user base may have been shrinking over the years, too. During the past year, while the top third-party apps were installed half a million times, Twitter’s app was installed 117 million times. This made third-party apps’ share only about 0.4 percent of downloads, giving the official app a 99 percent market share.
But third-party app developers and the apps’ users are power users. Zealots, even. Evangelists.
Twitter itself credited them with pioneering “product features we all know and love,” like the mute option, pull-to-refresh and more. That means the apps’ continued existence brings more value to Twitter’s service than numbers alone can show.
Image credit: iMore
They are part of Twitter’s history. You can even credit one of the apps for Twitter’s logo! Initially, Twitter only had a typeset version of its name. Then Twitterrific came along and introduced a bird for its logo. Twitter soon followed.
Twitterrific was also the first to use the word “tweet,” which is now standard Twitter lingo. (The company used “twitter-ing.” Can you imagine?)
These third-party apps also play a role in retaining users who struggle with the new user experience Twitter has adopted — its algorithmic timeline. Instead, the apps offer a chronological view of tweets, as some continue to prefer.
Twitter’s decision to cripple these developers’ apps is shameful.
It shows a lack of respect for Twitter’s history, its power user base, its culture of innovation and its very own nature as a platform, not a destination.
P.S.:
twitterrific
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