Mashery, possibly the coolest company in Silicon Valley that most people have never heard of, announced a Series A funding round tonight. The All-Star crew of angel investors in this "mashup service-provider" are being joined by VCs from two more firms, Formative Ventures and The Accelerator Group. The total A round was under $5 million and Mashery also announced a 16 company customer list.
What's so cool about this company? Mashery provides other companies with an interface through which to manage access to their APIs (application programming interfaces). Mashery applies the "business rules" of API access for its clients, managing throttling, caching and vetting requests. I wrote about the company in depth on TechCrunch almost a year ago when they launched.
In other words, Mashery helps companies enable their data and services to be used by 3rd party sites to combine their services with those of Mashery clients.
Who do I wish used Mashery to get a solid API out the door ASAP? Here's my fantasy list - what's yours?
Not only is Mashery focused on making these kinds of possibilities a reality, they've got the kinds of connections that can make all kinds of things happen. Angel investors include Josh Kopelman, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, and Dave McClure. Angels don't get much hotter than that.
Current customers include Trulia real estate search, Compete web analytics and business search engine ZoomInfo. You can see the full list on the Mashery site.
Now that they've got a year under their belt, Mashery's Oren Michels tells me that they are finding that most customers already have a handful of outside partners that they are giving special access to - but they use Mashery's services to open up those collaborative possibilities with any approved partners, systematically. If you recognize yourself in that path towards being mashed up, you might find Mashery to your liking.
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Hear hear! Twitter especially needs to get its API act together... too slow, too inconsistent. Can't wait to see more about Mashery in the future.
Posted by: Andy Pipes | September 27, 2007 12:44 AMLooks cool and many companies relay it. But my questions is that is nothing but a technical service company and doubt it will creat much value. May be i am wrong.
Posted by: Norman | September 27, 2007 5:29 AMforgot my website topwebsitesGuide.com
Posted by: Norman | September 27, 2007 7:07 AMGreat stuff Marshall and thanks.
Can someone explain easily the difference between Mashery, Dapper, Clearspring, Musestorm, etc. from a technology aspect AND a business stand-point?
It seems they all have some sorta 'middleware' play, but my head starts hurting when I try to distinguish them.
Marshall, an idea for an review/overview post? Thanks man.
Posted by: Chris | September 27, 2007 7:45 AMThanks Chris. That would make a good post. I'd say all those guys are exactly that - webservice middleware companies. Here's how I'd describe them:
Mashery is an API management service, an interface to manage an API you already created for your site.
Dapper says it "creates an API for any site" and is for use primarily by people who don't own a website but want to extract data from it.
ClearSpring and Musestorm I'll admit I don't know a heck of a lot about but my understanding is that they work primarily with RSS feeds (which are APIs of a sort) to display data outside of a website, typically in the form of a widget.
Anyone else care to take a crack at explaining the difference?
PS watch for another interesting post about one of these companies later this morning.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | September 27, 2007 8:04 AMMarshall, thanks for the great post! I believe, in your comments, you characterized the differences well.
@Norman - We are definitely a services company, though we see it as less about technical services and more about distribution channel management. Either way, though, what we do is provide features and infrastructure that companies need, but do it as an on-demand service, at a fraction of the cost of building and running it in-house, and with a more complete, and continuously evolving, feature set. This is a pretty tried and true concept that has created a lot of value; hopefully we'll do the same.
Oren Michels
Posted by: Oren Michels | September 27, 2007 10:29 AMCEO
Mashery
Marshall- lots of confusion on the differences. A breakdown/review posting would be super. It seems the more I read about these companies, the more confused I get (and I consider myself fairly saavy, well sorta).
Posted by: Chris | September 28, 2007 7:16 AMOn a side note: I'm surprised that these companies are getting investment, as the business models are fairly obscure. Don't get me wrong, the technology they generate is killer rocket-science stuff.