WireMock recently announced that it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding for WireMock Cloud, the first API developer productivity platform. This funding round was led by Ridge Ventures joined by First Rays Venture Partners and Scribble Ventures alongside several angel investors. And building on the success of its popular open-source API mocking tool, WireMock Cloud fixes the struggles of developing for modern, API-rich architectures.
APIs are known as being vital to modern businesses, enabling them to connect and integrate with platforms and apps from third parties, and internally between their own software and teams. And according to Gartner, 94% of organizations either use or are planning to use third-party APIs, up from just 52% in 2019. But building software that interacts with APIs is difficult.
Utilizing live APIs for development can be expensive and won’t always give the full range of responses that the developers need, or the loads for testing at scale. And sandboxes offered by API providers (if they exist at all) tend to be unstable, unreliable, and slow. Dev teams often need to integrate with internal APIs that do not exist yet, creating bottlenecks in situations such as for frontend teams that are trying to develop in parallel with their backend colleagues.
WireMock has created WireMock Cloud, which is the first API developer productivity platform for developing and testing software in an API-dependent environment. Whether through an OpenAPI specification, by recording API traffic, using an SDK, or even creating manually, the platform is able to simulate both third-party and internal APIs quickly, safely, and reliably. Plus it can even simulate nonexistent APIs still under development, so that different software teams can keep developing simultaneously, especially in microservice architectures.
WireMock was founded by Uri Maoz and Tom Akehurst, the company’s CTO. Akehurst originally created the open-source API mocking tool WireMock. And it now has over 4 million monthly recorded downloads of its Java library, and 200 contributors, and is being used by over 3,000 open-source projects.
WireMock’s API developer productivity platform WireMock Cloud incorporates the open-source solution alongside other developer productivity features and offers free, team and enterprise tiers. And by focusing solely on bottom-up product-led growth, WireMock Cloud has won hundreds of paying customers including Bilt Rewards, OVO Energy, Jumia, and ePay, and thousands of signups monthly.
WireMock plans to use the investment to build out a US go-to-market team as well as its engineering team. And the company plans to develop WireMock Cloud further to cover more of the API lifecycle, building towards a comprehensive API developer productivity platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“You can’t build useful integrated software without consuming a lot of APIs. But building, testing and maintaining that software shouldn’t have to rely on live APIs or inadequate sandboxes from multiple companies, not to mention under-development internal APIs. That’s a terrible model and it makes development slow, expensive and frustrating.”
“APIs are the glue that holds our interconnected software world together. They shouldn’t be getting developers stuck. WireMock frees developers and QA teams from their dependence on live or unimplemented APIs, so they can build and test connected applications with freedom and confidence.”
— Uri Maoz, co-founder and CEO of WireMock
“I built the WireMock OSS because I knew there had to be a better way for developers to develop in an environment where so many API dependencies were holding them back and slowing their delivery.”
— Tom Akehurst
“Often, investment is educated guesswork about the market and its needs. When it comes to WireMock, there was no need to guess; the impressive customer base proves that they’re filling a growing need. With API use exploding, WireMock’s approach, allowing companies to simulate APIs robustly, accurately and quickly, is the winning formula that software engineers need.”
— Akriti Dokania, Partner at Ridge Ventures
