CA Technologies confirms it has acquired Layer7

Layer7 is the latest application programming interface (API) startup to find a home inside a corporate IT giant.

CA Technologies confirmed today via a press release that it would be acquiring Layer7. Neither company disclosed the terms of the acquisition.

Layer7, founded in 2003, had raised about $20 million from BDC Venture Capital, GrowthWorks Capital, and Shoreline Venture Management. Its specialty is giving corporations “building blocks” (its words) to expose their internal applications to the world (or to their business partners) via APIs. That simplifies the technical details of integrating the companies’ various applications. In a way, APIs are like the plumbing of the software world, connecting applications to one another so that data can flow between them like water or gas.

Layer7 has hundreds of enterprise customers, and employs about 165 people at its Washington, D.C. headquarters and in Canada, U.K., and Australia.

“This enables us to extend our leading Mobility, Security and DevOps value proposition by liberating developers to securely connect applications to cloud services, expose internal information assets to mobile apps and bridge departments and partners all under a consistent security policy,” a CA spokesperson told VentureBeat via email.

CA, once known as Computer Associates, is a Fortune 500 corporation providing IT management solutions.

The acquisition comes just one week after Intel announced it would be scooping up Mashery, another hot API management company.

Layer7’s VP of client solutions, Matthew McLarty, recently wrote a post for VentureBeat about the lessons that Twitter and Google can teach us about APIs.

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