WunderGraph is known as an API Composition Framework designed for connecting all kinds of data sources through API Composition. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed WunderGraph COO and co-founder Björn Schwenzer and Head of Growth and co-founder Stefan Avram.
Background Of WunderGraph’s Founders
The founders of WunderGraph come from the US and Germany. And their backgrounds complement each other nicely: architecture, software engineering, marketing, and general management/company building.
Formation Of WunderGraph
(Jens Neuse), the company’s original founder worked as an engineering and architecture lead for Germany’s largest news portal. A key challenge was to integrate a lot of different APIs to feed data like stock market prices, weather, sports results, etc. into the news platform, which sometimes took weeks, even months to complete. He realized that API integration was still a very manual process, and thus a huge opportunity to massively save developer time by automation, reducing time to market and at the same time creating a competitive advantage.
Favorite Memory Working For WunderGraph
What has been a favorite memory working for WunderGraph so far? “All of us founders vividly remember the day we received the term sheet for our seed investment. It was there, it was real, and it meant we were going to become a real company, not just four founders with a vision and no money. We feel privileged to have this unique opportunity so many founders are striving for. Another memorable event was when we first met in person in Frankfurt in the summer of 2022. Until then, all that was available was video calls,” the company founders pointed out.
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate had any effect on the company? “The company is just as good as its team, so assembling a crew with the right mindset and skill was a massive challenge for an unknown start-up, especially since we hadn’t publicly announced our funding yet. The next important thing is staying focused and not falling into common traps, like building things you like without generating customer or user traction. Everything we do has to move the needle because there’s just that much runway. And finally, it’s incredible how much overhead you have to manage, legally and financially, even though you just want to build something great. Situations like the section 174 problem don’t help either if most of your spend is R&E. We really hope that Congress resolves this ASAP,” the company founders explained.
The company founders told me that the macroeconomic climate was actually good for a company like WunderGraph, which helps reduce personnel costs through automation.
“We are meeting with clients who are just discovering how much savings potential they have when automating their API integrations, or shipping code super fast through, no matter if on-premises or in the WunderGraph cloud. The ever-increasing API sprawl is the biggest problem in information technology these days, and it’s growing – together with the need to reduce efforts managing it,” the company founders continued.
Core Products
What are WunderGraph’s core products and features? “The world of technology connects through exchange points called interfaces (or more specifically: APIs), which facilitate the sending and receiving of data. Software developers integrate these APIs into their software to retrieve weather data, for example, or send a message to a user. WunderGraph provides an open-source API integration solution. It allows developers to integrate their APIs and data sources automatically and access the data through a single API which we call the “virtual graph”. On that basis, software engineers can expose select data through any kind of API with just a few lines of code, and it’s secure by default. This is a paradigm shift because API integration has been, until this day, a largely manual and error-prone process. We also include a testing suite so developers can find out how their implementations perform under different conditions,” the company founders explained. “In addition to that, WunderGraph has built its own Cloud solution so users can run their integrations without having to consider infrastructure. It’s a turnkey solution to iterate fast: integrate APIs and data sources, deploy them to the Cloud in seconds, and use it. ”
Evolution Of WunderGraph’s Technology
How has WunderGraph’s technology evolved since launching? “As a start-up, we strive to build and ship fast, then collect feedback and iterate to improve the product. Thanks to our lively community, users, and customers, we were able to focus on and build out the features that really make a difference to them, so now our solutions are a lot more mature than when we started out in early 2022. One of our major achievements was to build our own cloud solution that is extremely fast, available in several regions around the globe, and operating at a very reasonable cost – an advantage that we happily pass on to our customers,” the company founders noted.
Most Significant Milestones
What have been some of WunderGraph’s most significant milestones? “We published our open-source SDK in May 2022, just two months after we incorporated in Delaware. In August, we opened a subsidiary in Frankfurt, Germany, to better cover the EMEA region. The seed round was closed in October last year, which was the most important achievement as it meant there were investors believing in our vision, and that we could turn this into a real company and grow our team to full capacity. This was the prerequisite to release our cloud solution in March 2023,” the company founders reflected.
Customer Success Story
When I asked the company founders about a customer success story, a major player in the tourism sector was cited. “One of our key customers is a major player in the tourism sector who saved months of development time thanks to using WunderGraph. There are other stories in the making, but we would like to wait until the time is right to release them as case studies on our website,” the company founders highlighted.
Funding/Revenue
When I asked the company founders about funding and revenue, they replied:
“We have received $3 million in seed funding. Our goal is to always keep the open-source nature of WunderGraph and offer services on top of that which are game-changers for large organizations in the enterprise segment. However, lead times for these deals are long, so we are focusing on user and customer traction first, and to create a great developer experience which is something where most other products fall short. Currently, our main revenue channels are cloud usage and dedicated support contracts.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is WunderGraph pursuing? “Gartner values the global software spend in 2023 to be more than $800 billion. If we just look at the segment of companies that are upgrading their architectures e.g. to microservices, which entails a lot of API work, we are still looking at a TAM of $200 billion or more. We believe that APIs are the groundwork for any service going forward; and a connected world consisting of headless services simply depends on an API composition solution like WunderGraph to implement that connectivity. It’s like every device needs electricity to run, and APIs are the switches and plugs. WunderGraph is like the power grid connecting them all to make it work.. Given that the number of APIs grows by the tens of millions each year, companies like WunderGraph are essential to keeping the lights on,” the company founders assessed.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates WunderGraph from its competition? “WunderGraph doesn’t just offer a tool, it’s a framework to cover the API integration journey end-to-end. We also are, to our knowledge, the only platform not forcing customers into a defined technology stack, so WunderGraph keeps them flexible to use any technology (programming language, framework, databases) they like. From integrating APIs to deploying them on our or any other cloud, the only – but decisive – piece missing is a solution to collaborate on and manage APIs, which is already in the works,” the company founders emphasized.
Future Company Goals
What are some of WunderGraph’s future company goals? “WunderGraph Hub will be a true game-changer in the way developers and organizations collaborate on APIs. It will foster exchange between API providers and consumers, and provide transparency on API usage, history, or limitations. It will be for APIs what Github is for code today, adding the last major missing piece to WunderGraph as the world’s first full API-first integration, management, and collaboration platform,” the company founders concluded. “We would like to emphasize how important it is to have the right team for the journey, as well as the right partners and a great community. Without the help of all the contributors to WunderGraph, we wouldn’t be where we are today, and we are humbled by the support we’re receiving from all sides.”
