Transposit, a company that simplifies how applications are built, deployed, and managed, announced it raised $12.2 million in Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures. SignalFire and Unusual Ventures also participated in this round. The company also announced it launched a public beta and that its API composition platform is now available for developers.
Tina Huang, a former senior engineering leader at Apple, Google, and Twitter created Transposit and serves as the company co-founder and CTO. While working at the other companies, Huang worked on API integrations and external API commercialization. And Transposit co-founder and CEO Adam Leventhal is known as the creator of the performance analysis and troubleshooting tool DTrace and he served as the former CTO of database virtualization company Delphix.
Sutter Hill Managing Director Sam Pullara joined Transposit’s board when the company raised $3.2 million in seed funding from the venture firm. The board also includes Atlassian board member Kirk Bowman.
One of the biggest problems with APIs is that each one has a steep learning curve. And the average development team has to deal with hundreds of internal and external APIs. Plus more than 2,000 new APIs are published every year. And once API connections are set up, composing them to aggregate data and integrate the mechanisms is a manually intense process that requires days (sometimes months) to set up and handle ongoing maintenance.
Transposit’s API composition platform eases the challenges of getting overwhelmed by the overwhelming number of APIs that they have to deal with by bringing the power of a relational database to the API ecosystem. The Transposit relational engine translates standard SQL into optimized execution against APIs. And developers produce applications that can be shared and reused so that they get to focus on their core application logic rather than the grunt work of composing disparate APIs.
“Until now, everyone has been focused on making it easier to connect APIs. That’s important to solve, but it only addresses a small piece of the problem. The real work begins when you try to bring together those APIs to build useful applications: since there’s been no standard way to compose, developers tediously wire together pieces in what often looks like spaghetti code,” said Huang. “The result is fragile and rarely reusable. We created the Transposit composition platform to serve as the missing universal translation layer providing developers clean building blocks with which to compose APIs.”
Some of the initial connectors that are available in the Transposit beta include AWS (Lambda, S3, ECR, Cloudwatch, and more), Google (G Suite, Analytics), CircleCI, Elasticsearch, GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, SendGrid, Slack, Stripe, and more.
Sample apps developed with Transposit include a Slack vacation helper that automatically sets your Slack status while your Google Calendar says you are away on vacation. And it also supports a personalized email sender that passes inputs to a custom email template, previews before sending, and then sending.
“In 2008 when I was working at Yahoo! on YQL, the concept of having a simple query language for intermixing APIs was incredibly compelling to developers, but that vision was never fully realized. Back then, APIs were open, friendly, and much simpler to work with,” added Pullara. “Now, the ecosystem has become mind numbingly complex, requiring authentication and a lot of ops work just to get anything to function properly. What Transposit has built is the modern solution to that complexity, and I believe it’s going to be a sea change in improving the way developers work with APIs.”
Transposit charges based on a consumption model and it has a free community tier for all public applications and one private application. Private repositories start at $10 per month. You can sign up for the public beta on the Transposit website.
RedMonk Principal Analyst and co-founder Stephen O’Grady pointed out that as more data becomes distributed across an array of internal and external services, developers will need tools that allow them to spend more time putting data to work using standards they known such as SQL and less time “dealing with the tedious logistics of access and mapping an application to dozens of unique APIs.” And SignalFire’s head of operations and principal Stephen Trusheim exclaimed that Transposit is a “game-changer” that allows him to go from “idea” to “enterprise deployment” in just an hour of app logic rather than having to spend days or weeks integrating data, server clusters, and passing security review — which is how they knew it would make a great investment.
