By Jakub Nesetril (jakubnesetril, jakub@apiary.io) on 17 Sep 2013
This morning I’m happy to announce that Apiary has raised $1.63 million in seed funding from Baseline, Flybridge and other great investors. While I’ll leave the investment details to the PR wire, I wanted to take a moment to talk about what this means for us, and what it means for you—our users.
As part of our beta, we’ve offered our platform tools for free. Naturally, we’re often asked when we’re going to start charging and how much. Today I have two important announcements: 1) all existing services stay free; 2) we’re adding exciting premium features: the ability to create team accounts in Apiary (and manage all your APIs centrally) and the ability to embed your API documentation back into your own website and adapt the visual styling. And we’ll keep adding more in upcoming months.
I believe that good service to developers is a form of partnership, where it’s important to provide parts of our service in open source to promote trust and interoperability. In turn you help us build a thriving community. I was surprised how many investors avoid opensource, notwithstanding great examples of successful opensource companies. That’s why I’m especially excited to be working with David and Steve, because they really get developers and what it takes to do things right. As a result, opensource has never been stronger at Apiary and will continue that way. Whether it’s our brand new API Blueprint v2, the C parser Snowcrash, HTTP diff library Gavel, API testing library Dredd, our crowdsourced language example templates and many others. And we couldn’t be more thankful for the community helping us in return.
We’re also super-excited to be joining the amazing lineup of developer-focused companies as a member of Heavybit program and getting help from Heroku’s co-founder James Lindenbaum and his all-star team. If you’re in San Francisco, come and say hi at our new offices on 9th Street.
Over the last 12 months, you’ve created over 25,000 APIs in Apiary, making it the largest hub of APIs, unmatched in scope, run by you. We couldn’t be more thankful! But both we and web APIs are really just getting started. We have some big ideas on how to simplify the lifecycle of designing, developing and supporting APIs—and now we have the resources to make them happen.