Apigee scores $35M in funding for all the APIs you can handle

Apigee, an enterprise-grade API management platform company, has just announced a large round of funding: $35 million from a slew of marquee-grade investors.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup has three main products: Apigee Enterprise, a complete API management platform; Apigee Insights, an analytics tool; and Apigee API Exchange, which powers app ecosystems. The endgame of all three products is to help any kind of company link its applications and all the data generated to APIs for internal dev team use as well as use by external third-party developers.

“Monetization services, announced earlier this month, is an example of adding business capabilities to Apigee Enterprise,” said Sam Ramji, Apigee’s strategy chief, when we asked him about the startup’s roadmap.

“The demand for applying big data technologies to analyze digital ecosystems is increasing quickly, so we’ll expand Apigee Insights. … Finally, we see demand for further industry-specific API Exchanges like the one we have built for telecommunications in collaboration with the GSMA.”

In a recent article, we reported that in just five years, a full 85 percent of enterprise-level companies will have API programs in place.

The large majority of that activity will be driven by mobile. Of the other sources for the report, nearly 70 percent said they wanted to increase their integrations with business partners, and 68 percent wanted to develop APIs for the cloud. Other respondents said their internal devs needed APIs for their own projects, and 55 percent said they wanted to create communities of third-party developers.

“This is happening in response to the sudden dominance of mobile end-user computing and related new forms of competition,” said Ramji.

“API programs are important, but they are only a part of the change: it’s about engaging end-users (through apps); enabling employee, partner, and customer developers (through APIs); and understanding the digital value chain (through analytics).

“We fully expect 100 percent of the Global 2000 and Fortune 500 to depend on APIs by 2017, but by then they will be asking for much more than API programs as part of their digital transformation.”

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“Mobile changes everything, and every business must have a comprehensive digital strategy that includes reaching customers and expanding through mobile apps,” said Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor in a statement on the funding.

“Apigee helps companies of all sizes deliver and manage the core elements of a connected mobile world: apps, data, and APIs,” he continued, noting that with the above-mentioned enterprise focus on APIs, Apigee is sitting in a particularly lucrative sweet spot.

The funding was led by a new fund managed by BlackRock with participation from Accenture and existing investors Bay Partners, Focus Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures.