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Why we invested in Gravitee - written by Archit Rathi, investor at Oxx
We’re excited to announce that Oxx has co-led a $11m Series A investment in Gravitee.io, the integrated API and Access Management platform for the modern era! We are proud to partner with Rory, Nicolas, David, Titouan, Azize and the fantastic team they have assembled, alongside our friends at Albion VC.
Modern software architectures have become much more complex over time. In this cloud native era, engineering teams are decentralised, so developers choose their own technology stacks and usually have end-to-end operational responsibilities. Applications can be run across various environments (bare metal servers, VMs, containers, serverless), protocols (websocket, gRPC, HTTP, Kafka), authentication mechanisms and so on.
This means that not only do API access and routing decisions now need a richer set of user and application data, but data sovereignty, privacy and security also bring on new forms of challenges. Simply speaking, in a microservices-driven world, the modern tech stack is built on APIs and having an API management platform in place is now absolutely business-critical for most organisations.
The role of API gateways has evolved to be increasingly central to enterprise architecture
Historically as companies initially embraced the cloud and started exposing APIs externally, they typically relied on either a homegrown solution or a first generation ‘enterprise service bus (ESB)’ middleware to manage this complexity. In a world where monolithic architecture was prevalent, ESBs gained instant popularity. However, making simple configuration / integration changes and maintaining them required costly time from a subject matter expert. By 2018, most of these first generation middleware platforms were acquired, with Salesforce’s $6.5bn acquisition of Mulesoft being the largest acquisition in this space.
Meanwhile, consumer demands for higher velocity data (consider how you now track your fast food delivery services, taxis and parcels to your door) naturally led to the emergence of technologies and architectures including Kubernetes, Kafka, Serverless functions and beyond. The challenge of managing and leveraging the data that resides within this ever growing and complex environment led to the emergence of the second generation of API Platforms.
We are now entering the third phase of this evolution. Basic functionalities have become table stakes and are therefore no longer points of differentiation. What matters to the modern enterprise is the ability to effortlessly control this complex API ecosystem.
Enter Gravitee
Gravitee is an open source API platform that gives businesses and their developers unprecedented control and visibility over their entire API ecosystem. This ranges from designing APIs utilising a visual mind-map based approach to securing them with integrated IAM (Identity & Access Management) to financial services standards of security, publishing them, monitoring performance and alerting on issues.
This full-stack approach combined with possibly the most open source product proposition in the market is resonating with customers globally. Customers spanning industries including Tide, Auchan, household names in mobility, pharmaceuticals and several tier 1 enterprise customers from 20+ countries are already using Gravitee in production, driving its 160%+ y-o-y growth.
Without Gravitee’s control and insight into API use, the reliability of systems is at risk. Customer experience is worsened, security risks remain hidden and the business value of technology investment is eroded.
Rory and the team have successfully bootstrapped a next generation API platform that gets +35,000 downloads per month and is:
highly performant - 3x faster than its most significant competitor,
easy to use - cloud-native, flexibly priced solution that developers actually enjoy integrating with their tech stacks,
truly open source - can actually deploy the fully featured product in production, and
has a product breadth that’s unrivalled in the industry.
We could not be more excited to join and support Gravitee’s journey! Mikael Johnsson from the Oxx team has also joined Gravitee’s board. Learn more about Gravitee and try out the product here. And if you’re looking to help build, do consider contributing on GitHub or joining them full-time - the Gravitee team is hiring!
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Want to discuss Gravitee or the API economy with Archit? Email him here, or continue the conversation on Linkedin or Twitter.
