🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Speakeasy

✍️ Notes from the Editors

In the world of the web, the common language between all websites and applications is dictated through APIs. These interfaces are what make it possible for data to seamlessly flow from point A to point B—but APIs aren’t always easy to plug and chug into software.

This week’s company is, to put it simply, making APIs speak easy with the software developers build.

- Ethan and Arek 🦄

Enterprise-ready APIs in a click

Speakeasy is a platform of developer tools enabling engineering teams to streamline their API experience. Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, allow developers to interact with code that others have built, and Speakeasy’s Managed SDK tool allows API developers to automatically generate enterprise-ready software development kits, or SDKs, letting developers’ customers seamlessly integrate with their APIs across 9 languages with automatic documentation. Speakeasy can also create Terraform providers, which are plugins for Terraform—a popular infrastructure-as-code tool—enabling API customers to easily integrate and manage their APIs within their existing codebase and technology stack.

🔗 Check it out: speakeasyapi.dev

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💰 Business Model

Speakeasy offers a free plan for small teams to access its basic SDK generation tool and put one SDK into production. For medium-sized teams under 50 employees, the company has the Scale Up plan, which adds more languages, Terraform functionality, and private Slack support for $250 per month per coding language SDK and $500 per month per Terraform provider. Large teams may opt for the custom enterprise plan, which unlocks greater support and more advanced features. Speakeasy also offers a startup discount of 50% off the Scale Up plan for 12 months for any teams in an incubator program or having recently graduated from one.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised a $7.6 million Seed Round, led by Google Ventures

• Deployed 4,000 SDKs and trusted by teams at Shippo, Airbyte, Kong, and more

• Support for 9 languages, including TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, and Swift

👫 Founders

• Sagar Batchu: CEO: Previously Engineering Mentor @ Plato, Member @ South Park Commons, Director of Engineering @ LiveRamp, Software Engineer @ Enlighted, Physics @ Harvey Mudd College

• Simon Yu: COO: Previously Co-Founder @ CloudReactor, Product @ SafeGraph, Co-Founder @ SpendOps, Senior PM @ VMware, Associate @ Francisco Partners, Associate @ Boston Consulting Group, MBA @ Harvard

💼 Opportunities

• Product Engineer (San Francisco)

• Product Engineer (London)

• Design Engineer

• Technical Account Manager

• Developer Advocate

🔮 Our Analysis

In a world where customers are increasingly expecting technology solutions from companies of all sorts, enterprises are building their own software in-house, and APIs are tools that allow these companies to save engineering time by integrating with pre-packaged and hosted code. To address this need, a plethora of SaaS companies have been built, offering APIs for customers to interact with and streamline their code; however, many developers prefer to work with SDKs rather than APIs for their language flexibility and convenience for integration. While APIs provide the essential functions for code to interact with other systems, SDKs offer more comprehensive tools, including libraries and documentation, making it easier for developers to quickly integrate and utilize these functions within their specific programming workflows. Speakeasy allows for API providers to focus on building software to serve customer needs rather than creating ease-of-use tooling for their customers.

Furthermore, amid a market reeling back from sky-high developer costs, Speakeasy’s value proposition to customers is simple: automating the generation of SDKs, thereby saving hundreds of developer hours spent on code and maintenance. This proposition becomes even more appealing given the promise of AI tools to shrink engineering costs by multiplying the output of developers, and Speakeasy’s use of AI in its code generation means that its product will continue to improve as LLMs advance in their code-writing capabilities. Speakeasy’s focus on improving developer productivity is further shown through its features of automatically documenting and maintaining SDKs—a practice that will allow engineering teams to dedicate their efforts to innovation and serving their customers, rather than low-impact maintenance and dealing with technical busy work. With its comprehensive solution leveraging AI-driven automation to improve developer productivity from building to deploying and maintaining, Speakeasy is well-positioned to be an essential co-pilot to any teams building APIs.

📚 Further reading

• Speakeasy is using AI to automate API creation and distribution [TechCrunch]

• Speakeasy’s Product Updates [Speakeasy]

Written by Rohan Desai

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