Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

APIs are the grease turning the gears and wheels for many organizations’ IT systems today, but as APIs grow in number and use, tracking how they work (or don’t work) together can become complex and potentially critical if something goes awry. Now, a startup that has built an innovative way to help with this is announcing some funding after getting traction with big enterprises adopting its approach.

Tyk, which has built a way for users to access and manage multiple internal enterprise APIs through a universal interface by way of GraphQL, has picked up $35 million, an investment that it will be using both for hiring and to continue enhancing and expanding the tools that it provides to users. Tyk has coined a term describing its approach to managing APIs and the data they produce — “universal data graph” — and today its tools are being used to manage APIs by some 10,000 businesses, including large enterprises like Starbucks, Societe Generale and Domino’s.

Scottish Equity Partners led the round, with participation also from MMC Ventures — its sole previous investor from a round in 2019 after boostrapping for its first five years. The startup is based out of London but works in a very distributed way — one of the co-founders is living in New Zealand currently — and it will be hiring and growing based on that principle, too. It has raised just over $40 million to date.

Tyk (pronounced like “tyke”, meaning small/lively child) got its start as an open source side project first for co-founder Martin Buhr, who is now the company’s CEO, while he was working elsewhere, as a “load testing thing,” in his words.

The shifts in IT toward service-oriented architectures, and building and using APIs to connect internal apps, led him to rethink the code and consider how it could be used to control APIs. Added to that was the fact that as far as Buhr could see, the API management platforms that were in the market at the time — some of the big names today include Kong, Apigee (now a part of Google), 3scale (now a part of RedHat and thus IBM), MuleSoft (now a part of Salesforce) — were not as flexible as his needs were. “So I built my own,” he said.

It was built as an open source tool, and some engineers at other companies started to use it. As it got more attention, some of the bigger companies interested in using it started to ask why he wasn’t charging for anything — a sure sign as any that there was probably a business to be built here, and more credibility to come if he charged for it.

“So we made the gateway open source, and the management part went into a licensing model,” he said. And Tyk was born as a startup co-founded with James Hirst, who is now the COO, who worked with Buhr at a digital agency some years before.

The key motivation behind building Tyk has stayed as its unique selling point for customers working in increasingly complex environments.

“What sparked interest in Tyk was that companies were unhappy with API management as it exists today,” Buhr noted, citing architectures using multiple clouds and multiple containers, creating more complexity that needed better management. “It was just the right time when containerization, Kubernetes and microservices were on the rise… The way we approach the multi-data and multi-vendor cloud model is super flexible and resilient to partitions, in a way that others have not been able to do.”

“You engage developers and deliver real value and it’s up to them to make the choice,” added Hirst. “We are responding to a clear shift in the market.”

One of the next frontiers that Tyk will tackle will be what happens within the management layer, specifically when there are potential conflicts with APIs.

“When a team using a microservice makes a breaking change, we want to bring that up and report that to the system,” Buhr said. “The plan is to flag the issue and test against it, and be able to say that a schema won’t work, and to identify why.”

Even before that is rolled out, though, Tyk’s customer list and its growth speak to a business on the cusp of a lot more.

“Martin and James have built a world-class team and the addition of this new capital will enable Tyk to accelerate the growth of its API management platform, particularly around the GraphQL focused Universal Data Graph product that launched earlier this year,” said Martin Brennan, a director at SEP, in a statement. “We are pleased to be supporting the team to achieve their global ambitions.”

Keith Davidson, a partner at SEP, is joining the Tyk board as a non-executive director with this round.

Hasura is an open-source engine that can connect to PostgreSQL databases and microservices across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments and then automatically build a GraphQL API backend for them, making it easier for developers to then build their own data-driven applications on top of this unified API . For a while now, the San Francisco-based startup has offered a paid version (Hasura Pro) with enterprise-ready reliability and security tools, in addition to its free open-source version. Today, the company launched Hasura Cloud, which takes the existing Pro version, adds a number of cloud-specific features like dynamic caching, auto-scaling and consumption-based pricing, and brings those together in a fully managed service.

Image Credits: Hasura

At its core, Hasura’s service promises businesses the ability to bring together data from their various siloed databases and allow their developers to extract value from them through its GraphQL APIs. While GraphQL is still relatively new, the Facebook-incubated technology has quickly become extremely popular among many development teams.

Before founding the company and launching it in 2018, Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal worked for a consulting firm — and like with so many founders, that’s where he got the inspiration for the service.

“One of the key things that we noticed was that in the entire landscape, computing is becoming better, there are better frameworks, it is easier to deploy code, databases are becoming better and they kind of work everywhere,” he said. “But this kind of piece in the middle that is still a bottleneck and that there isn’t really a good solution for is this data access piece.” Almost by default, most companies host data in various SaaS services and databases — and now they were trying to figure out how to develop apps based on this for both internal and external consumers, noted Gopal. “This data distribution problem was this bottleneck where everybody would just spend massive amounts of time and money. And we invented a way of kind of automating that,” he explained.

The choice of GraphQL was also pretty straightforward, especially because GraphQL services are an easy way for developers to consume data (even though, as Gopal noted, it’s not always fun to build the GraphQL service itself). One thing that’s unusual and worth noting about the core Hasura engine itself is that it is written in Haskell, which is a rather unusual choice.

Image Credits: Hasura

The team tells me that Hasura is now nearing 50 million downloads for its free version and the company is seeing large and small users from across various industries relying on its products, which is probably no surprise, given that the company is trying to solve a pretty universal problem around data access and consumption.

Over the last few quarters, the team worked on launching its cloud service. “We’ve been thinking of the cloud in a very different way,” Gopal said. “It’s not your usual, take the open-source solution and host it, like a MongoDB Atlas or Confluent. What we’ve done is we’ve said, we’re going to re-engineer the open-source solution to be entirely multi-tenant and be completely pay-per pricing.”

Given this philosophy, it’s no surprise that Hasura’s pricing is purely based on how much data a user moves through the service. “It’s much closer to our value proposition,” Hasura co-founder and COO Rajoshi Ghosh said. “The value proposition is about data access. The big part of it is the fact that you’re getting this data from your databases. But the very interesting part is that this data can actually come from anywhere. This data could be in your third-party services, part of your data could be living in Stripe and it could be living in Salesforce, and it could be living in other services. […] We’re the data access infrastructure in that sense. And this pricing also — from a mental model perspective — makes it much clearer that that’s the value that we’re adding.”

Now, there are obviously plenty of other data-centric API services on the market, but Gopal argues that Hasura has an advantage because of its advanced caching for dynamic data, for example.