- Archetype is a company that empowers companies to monetize APIs. These are the details.
Archetype is a fintech B2B platform company that enables companies to monetize APIs – which reduces the efforts and resources needed for back-office work. And the company’s platform enables API-first companies to easily deploy flexible pricing models, track usage, and reconcile data into invoicing.
Archetype recently raised $3.1 million in a seed round of funding. That funding round was led by led by MaC Venture Capital, a leading seed-stage investment firm, with participation from Hustle Fund, Magic Fund, NOMO Ventures, Soma Capital, and more. With the funding round, Archetype plans to further develop and expand the company’s product and team.
To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed co-founder Behailu Tekletsadik. Tekletsadik is an Ethiopian immigrant currently based in NY/Boston and is a second-time founder and software engineer. Archetype is the second company Tekletsadik started and the first was Lantern, an options trading platform.
Before that, Tekletsadik was based in the Bay area working for LinkedIn, Dialpad, and Applied Materials. And at LinkedIn, Tekletsadik worked on developer productivity and tools; at Dialpad Tekletsadik worked on Uberconference, which is now known as Dialpad Meet, a B2B and B2C video conferencing platform. And while at Applied Materials, Tekletsadik worked on applications of AI for optimizing silicon processes. Tekletsadik double majored in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and has lived in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Mississauga, and Edinburgh.
How did the idea for Archetype come together?
Tekletsadik said that on their first startup Lantern, they were trying to launch an API selling to stratified customer bases (hedge funds, enterprises, down to individual retail traders). But they kept running into the same problems such as creating the rules, tracking usage, assigning plans, and launching self-serve: it took months and months of effort and that is where the idea of Archetype came from. They wanted to launch a platform in which companies could create any pricing model and deploy a fully managed self-serve solution in as little as 15 minutes.
What are Archetype’s core products and features?
The company’s products and features are unique and they include SDKs that integrate with backends as well as integrations with payment processors like Stripe and other accounting software suites. The company is also SOC2 compliant, making it much easier for companies to implement billing integration. Plus they have hosted and branded checkout flows, customer portals, and pricing pages to enable self-serve API products on top of customized packages for enterprise customers. The company also enables price experimentation, entitlement, and access management that differentiates them from being a pure billing infra-play.
What was the process of taking the idea for Archetype to a full-fledged business?
Before this, Tekletsadik co-founded a company that sold options market data and they built and shipped real-time scalable infrastructure that distributed terabytes of daily options data to power apps and APIs. The team learned a lot about building event-streamed architecture and dealing with selling APIs (B2B and self-serve) to customers and they were eager to make a want for fast and cost-effective API monetization a reality. At that last company, they struggled for months to monetize its products effectively, tracking usage and creating custom packages and rules for its customers.
How has Archetype’s technology evolved since launching?
When the team first started out, they were building billing infrastructure for the use case at the options company but as they talked to more and more companies, they realized a need to expand dimensionality across pricing flexibility, more rules around access control and more integrations. But the core product of creating usage-based pricing and async/easy event tracking is still the same.
What has been some of the customer feedback that Archetype’s received so far?
The company’s customers love the simple interface, easy integration, and focus on performance and analytics. And the customers also love that they handle metering and restriction infrastructure for API/data/infra projects.
What distinguishes Archetype from its competition?
The company’s audience is a mix of technical founders at early/mid-stage startups of API-first companies and later-stage companies that can be API-first or not (if they’re not, ideally launching APIs as a secondary revenue stream or thinking about digital transformation, and platformization). And in those later-stage organizations, they are looking at talking to revops, finance, and PMs. These individuals and companies continue to use Archetype since the system works efficiently and it is easy to implement and is reliable.
What are some of Archetype’s future company goals?
Archetype is hoping to continue to grow as a company, gain more customers, and become a household name in API monetization.
