API Marketplace Mashape Raises Funding
Mashape, an up-and-coming marketplace for APIs, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding — which seems like a pretty small amount given the investors it came from: NEA, Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, among others.
The San Francisco-based company, which originated in Italy, helps Web services connect with each other — so for instance the creators of a new social site wouldn’t have to build their own image resizer, and the maker of an image resizer tool would have less trouble getting it distributed.
Mashape has nearly 200 APIs on its platform so far, including Tinypay.me and Rapleaf. No big API companies — like, say, a Twitter — have signed on, but CEO Aghi Marietti said he hoped to graduate up to larger players like the code-sharing site GitHub has.
Mashape plans to make money by taking a cut of any fee its users charge for their APIs, and will help them with things like billing systems.
