SAN FRANCISCO — WireMock 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.
