The company has gained hundreds of paying customers through product-led growth
SAN FRANCISCO, May 24, 2023 — WireMock today announced that it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding for WireMock Cloud, the first API developer productivity platform. The funding round was led by Ridge Ventures joined by First Rays Venture Partners and Scribble Ventures alongside several angel investors. Building on the success of its popular open source API mocking tool, WireMock Cloud fixes the struggles of developing for modern, API-rich architectures.
APIs are vital to modern businesses, enabling them to connect and integrate with platforms and apps from third parties, and internally between their own software and teams. According to Gartner, 94% of organizations either use or are planning to use third-party APIs, up from just 52% in 2019. However, building software that interacts with APIs is difficult. Using live APIs for development can be expensive and won’t always give the full range of responses that the developers need, or the loads for testing at scale. Sandboxes offered by API providers, if they exist at all, tend to be unstable, unreliable and slow. Dev teams often need to integrate with internal APIs that don’t exist yet, creating bottlenecks in situations such as for frontend teams that are trying to develop in parallel with their backend colleagues.
“You can’t build useful integrated software without consuming a lot of APIs,” said Uri Maoz, co-founder and CEO of WireMock. “But building, testing and maintaining that software shouldn’t have to rely on live APIs or inadequate sandboxes from multiple companies, not to mention under-development internal APIs. That’s a terrible model and it makes development slow, expensive and frustrating.”
WireMock has created WireMock Cloud, the first API developer productivity platform for developing and testing software in an API-dependent environment. Whether from an OpenAPI specification, by recording API traffic, using an SDK or even created manually, the platform can simulate both third-party and internal APIs quickly, safely and reliably. It can even simulate nonexistent APIs still under development, so that different software teams can keep developing simultaneously, especially in microservice architectures.
WireMock was co-founded by Uri Maoz and Tom Akehurst, the company’s CTO. Akehurst originally created the open source API mocking tool WireMock. It now has more than four million monthly recorded downloads of its Java library, 200 contributors and is being used by over 3,000 open source projects
“I built the WireMock OSS because I knew there had to be a better way for developers to develop in an environment where so many API dependencies were holding them back and slowing their delivery,” said Akehurst.
WireMock’s API developer productivity platform, WireMock Cloud, incorporates the open source solution alongside other developer productivity features, and offers free, team and enterprise tiers. By focusing solely on bottom-up product-led growth, WireMock Cloud has won hundreds of paying customers including Bilt Rewards, OVO Energy, Jumia and ePay, and thousands of signups monthly.
“Often, investment is educated guesswork about the market and its needs. When it comes to WireMock, there was no need to guess; the impressive customer base proves that they’re filling a growing need,” said Akriti Dokania, Partner at Ridge Ventures. “With API use exploding, WireMock’s approach, allowing companies to simulate APIs robustly, accurately and quickly, is the winning formula that software engineers need.”
WireMock will use the investment to build out a US go-to-market team as well as its engineering team. The company plans to further develop WireMock Cloud to cover more of the API lifecycle, building towards a comprehensive API developer productivity platform.
“APIs are the glue that holds our interconnected software world together,” added Maoz. “They shouldn’t be getting developers stuck. WireMock frees developers and QA teams from their dependence on live or unimplemented APIs, so they can build and test connected applications with freedom and confidence.”
About WireMock:
WireMock is an API platform to improve developer productivity. WireMock enables developers and testers to mock APIs in every stage of the API lifecycle — allowing teams to reduce dependency on 3rd party and internal APIs and develop much faster. WireMock Cloud is a platform built on the open-source Wiremock mocking software. WireMock is used by thousands of companies and more than 2M developers around the world.
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SOURCE WireMock
