A. P. I. It's a platform rapid
ap I specifically becoming a unicorn with a billion dollar
valuation after raising 100 and$50 million in a series
D. Round the round was led by Softbank Vision
Fund to Microsoft's venture fund and 12 and Andrews and
Horowitz also participating. And Rapid Ap I seen it
provides the world's biggest api hub which enables millions of
developers and companies to build software faster. So joining
me now is it oh gino, founder and ceo
of Rapid Ap I. Ito thanks so much for
coming on the show. So how is your company
innovating in this space? Yes. So we're essentially
helping developers discover and connect what are called a.
P. I. S. Which are essentially building
blocks they can embed into their software. Um So
if you think about building an application or a piece
of software instead of building everything from scratch, they
can use these A. P. I. S
. To accelerate how they're bringing functionality and different pieces
into their new app. What's your business model?
Obviously you're set to make money on this. You
just raised 100 and 50 million with a billion dollar
valuation. A lot of momentum behind your company.
Ito what's your own business model? Yeah. So
we're essentially operated as a marketplace. So we have
a community of about four million developers to consume 80
s rapid and tens of thousands of apis that are
available on the platform and when you use those services
so you you call an api let's say to send
an email or send a text message or store an
image. You pay for that service and we take
a small commission out of that transaction. What is
the influence that a. P. I. S
have on organizations, individuals, developers, just how
crucial are they? Yeah. So so they're becoming
in fact that the fundamental building blocks for software and
if you think about you know the last decade or
two where digital transformation became critical to every single industry
and especially in the last two years where everyone went
to digital when a lot of the brick and mortar
side of their business died, the ability for businesses
to deliver software and digital experiences faster became critical.
And the only way they can do that, especially
when you have less and less developers in the market
and more companies competing for them is by making their
developers more efficient and the way to make them more
efficient is by having them leverage A. P.
I. S instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
So you can kind of think about it when You
know a big Fortune 500 goes to develop the next
version of their app for a big new suffrage system
. Instead of building everything from scratch and taking years
, they can leverage about a bunch of a PS
from our platform and do it in months. What
are some of the companies, you know working with
your firm using your services and what are some of
the results that they've seen? Yeah. So obviously
we've mentioned about four million developers using rapid API and
in fact there in about 70% of the fortune 500
there. Our developers paying and leveraging the rapid API
platform. So it's almost any company that you can
think of that is that is innovating on software that's
already leveraging the platform and you know, the main
areas where we see them driving results is being able
to develop soft faster, so bye bye. Kind
of leveraging those ap eyes and those building blocks,
they can deliver new digital experiences a lot faster and
they can also add a lot more capabilities into that
software. So you look at our platform cps for
things like ai machine learning, image recognition and all
these advanced capabilities. Now it's very easy to just
stitch those and embed those into applications so you can
deliver better experiences. You're based in San Francisco,
you've got a supercool office which I can see behind
you some big time investors. I mean the biggest
VC firms out there investing in your company and you
just raised 150 million. How are you gonna use
that money to grow? Yeah. So our our
mission as a company is to empower developers to create
transformative software and we've been doing that with about four
million developers now. We want to do it with
every developer out there. So we want to use
a lot of that money to access to number one
accelerate the rate in which we grow our community,
um and help more developers use our tools, but
also constantly, you know, increase our R and
D initiatives so we can deliver better tools for those
developers and empower them more. Um, so a
lot of R and D investment in improving our tools
and then obviously just growing the market share that we
have with developers alright? You know, Gino Founder
and Ceo Ceo of Rapid A. P. I
, you know, thanks so much for coming on
the show. Congratulations.