DigitalAPICraft CEO Bharath Kumar
Application programming interfaces (APIs) increasingly make the world go round. By enabling computer programmes to communicate with one another, they underpin many of the online products and services we’ve come to rely on. But there is a problem – as organisations create vast numbers of APIs, organising, managing and maintaining these tools has got more and more difficult.
That’s where Austin-based start-up DigitalAPICraft believes it has a bright future. It creates “API marketplaces” for organisations – a single portal or platform where the organisation can make all its APIs available, add tools to make partners’ lives easier, ensure security, and begin to work towards monetising their links.
CEO and founder Bharath Kumar says DigitalAPICraft, which is today announcing it has secured a deal to sell its services through the Google Cloud marketplace, can solve many of the problems faced by organisations trying to manage a sprawling and complex set of APIs.
“A large bank, say, may have created thousands of APIs, which it then makes available to tens of thousands of other organisations looking to work with it,” says Kumar. “Trying to manage that resource in-house, and to do so in the most effective and value-additive ways, is really challenging.”
DigitalAPICraft therefore offers a while label solution – customers such as banks effectively outsource their API management to it, but retain their own branding on the marketplace. These customers are typically focusing on two different audiences: external partners, whose developers need access to the right APIs to build links with their own products, and internal stakeholders who are improving connectivity between different lines of business and functions.
In the first category, a bank, for example, might need to ensure that an online accounting service can use an API to enable its customers to automatically draw down transaction data from their bank accounts for a tax return. An internal customer, by contrast, might be trying to ensure that one part of the bank is able to pull in detail about account holders from other areas of the business that also provide them with products and services.
Either way, the developers tasked with integrating these APIs into their own systems will be better placed to work quickly if there is a single port of call to find all the APIs they need, backed up with functionality enabling them to do their job more quickly and efficiently. “It’s all about improving the developer experience,” adds Kumar. “Our goal is to reduce the time it takes to complete API integrations. But we also provide tools that help developers to test their integrations properly before they go live.”
In key target markets for DigitalAPICraft such as financial services, the additional challenge is the increasingly strict regulatory regime. Watchdogs are anxious to ensure APIs do not become a weak point in the IT landscape, particularly with so much sensitive and valuable data at stake. That adds to the business case for outsourcing API management to a specialist player.
This is a market that is growing fast. The API management industry was worth around $2.2 billion globally in 2021 according to data from Allied Market Research but is expected to grow at a rate of more than 30% a year to be worth more than $41 billion by 2031.
“The adoption of API management is increasing significantly after Covid, due to a surge in digitalization, increases in sales of smartphones and work-from-home policies,” the research concludes. “The penetration of API management [tools] has increased significantly as they offer several advantages.”
Not surprisingly, given this growth, competition is hotting up, with both start-ups and larger technology businesses developing solutions. The latter have often chosen to buy their way into the market. Google bought Apigee, for example, while Salesforce acquired Mulesoft. Independents such as Postman are also growing fast.
Nevertheless, Kumar believes DigitalAPICraft can hold its own. The company, founded in 2019, says it has already built annual revenues in excess of $2 million, with a target of reaching $10 million within the next two years. Clients include several Fortune 500 companies.
The key will be to develop new services as quickly as possible – particularly as organisations such as banks look to secure value from their APIs. “We expect to see banks begin charging for access to some of their APIs,” Kumar adds.
To meet such needs, DigitalAPICraft is scaling its team fast, with more than 100 employees now based in the US, India and the UK. Adding to that number, it will today announce that Marco Tedone is joining the company as chief technology officer. Tedone previously worked for HSBC, where he led the bank’s work on API strategy and governance.
