Apiwiz Raises $2M Seed Round to Create a Single View of Cross-Organizational API Lifecycle Management

Apiwiz offers the first holistic, low-code API platform that manages enterprise API programs across the whole design, building, testing, and monitoring API lifecycle, with a technology-agnostic approach to API gateways and Service Mesh.

Apiwiz, a low-code API (application programming interface) lifecycle management platform, today announces it has secured US$2 million in seed funding to scale up its technology investment and expand its customer base. The funding comes from Raj Khaware, the founder and CEO of VeeAR Projects, a Silicon Valley-based tech consulting and angel investing enterprise.

Organizations today face significant pressure to deploy APIs more quickly and an overwhelming tool stack that comes with a considerable investment of time and money. Apiwiz helps enterprises respond to changing customer demands more quickly by simplifying the design, development, management, and monetization of APIs. Apiwiz helps keep developer burnout and governance risks at bay by becoming the de facto control plane for cross-organizational APIs. This unique API lifecycle management platform stands out with a vendor-agnostic approach that allows organizations the freedom to use multiple API gateways and Service Mesh architectures as they scale from hundreds to thousands of APIs. Apiwiz’s solution is a low-code API DevOps platform that increases developer productivity by abstracting complexity, while still emphasizing security and governance standards through an API design-first approach.

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Apiwiz is planning to utilize the US$2 million to build out its already industry-leading technical offering, expand its current team, and broaden its go-to-market campaign with an eye on solving the complexity and governance needs of well-regulated markets. The founders are moving the HQ from Seattle to Pleasonton, California, opening a new office in Bangalore, India, and expanding its development and go-to-market teams.

The obtained funding will help scale technology investments and drive efforts to ensure the broadest, tool-agnostic coverage of API gateways and Service Mesh architectures in order to accelerate Apiwiz’s mission of establishing itself as the de-facto API Lifecycle Management platform engineered for better developer productivity.

Apiwiz has chosen to partner with VeeAR Projects as their sole seed round investor because of VeeAR’s proven track record of working with and scaling up enterprise platform modernization strategies. Their founder continuously bets on disruptive cloud-native organizations and wins. Lead Apiwiz angel investor is Raj Khaware, who has a diverse, disruptive portfolio spanning across fintech, AI, virtual reality, entertainment, energy, manufacturing, security, and supply chains, or, as he described his mission: “To improve on the efficiencies of our businesses that get bogged down for lack of solutions or lack of know-how and to attract all these new, brilliant, solution-oriented people like Darshan, Rakshith, and their team.”

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Consequently, Apiwiz equips businesses in the API economy with the unrivaled capability to execute a strategic, centralized vision for API management and API monetization. “I’m excited we have partnered with Raj and the whole investor team at VeeAR Projects to help bring our decoupled API control plane to banks and other regulated industries trying to leverage their complex, distributed infrastructure. We believe they are the perfect partners that understand the social and technical complexity that needs to be abstracted for better governance,” said Apiwiz Founder and CTO Darshan Shivashankar.

Darshan Shivashankar has been building the Apiwiz team and platform as founder and CEO since 2018, following work as a solution and API architect at Kaiser Permanente, T-Mobile, Vodafone Turkey, eHealth, Pepsi-Co, Starbucks, and Google Apigee, where he met co-founder Rakshith Rao in 2012. Rakshith has two decades of experience in enterprise sales leadership, first at HP, then 10 years at Apigee, which was acquired by Google in 2016, and, most recently, regional sales director at DataStax. The two have combined 30 years working in the digital economy at Fortune 100 companies, advising and driving complex architectural decisions and implementation.

Darshan is moving into the role of CTO, while Rakshith will apply his extensive international sales leadership experience to the part of CEO.

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“After a decade of seeing different API teams struggling with identical problems, we saw a need for a solution. However, it’s not simply a question of cherry-picking from the different software tools already in use! Apiwiz is a tremendous opportunity to enable a strategic approach. We built towards the following goal – One place. One solution. One view of your cross-organizational strategy,” said Rao.

The Apiwiz board of directors is also welcoming a new member Prem Uppaluru, founder of Fluent (acquired by Novell), Telera (acquired by Alcatel), and Transera (acquired by BroadSoft/Cisco). Upparluru is a seasoned executive with general management and technical leadership positions at BroadSoft, Transera, Genesys, Telera, Novell, Fluent, Bellcore, and Bell Labs.

“Enterprises embracing digital transformation rely on APIs to expose the hidden value of their data and services. I am pleased to join the Apiwiz board to help Darshan and Rakshith realize their grand vision of creating the business that makes it easy for enterprises to manage the complexities of API management,” said Prem Uppaluru.