Mashape Raises $18M for API Gateway Tech
Application Programming Interface (API) gateway vendor Mashape announced a new $18 million Series B round of funding on March 23, bringing total funding to date for the company to $26.1 million since the company was founded in 2010.
The new round of funding was led by Andreesen Horowitz, with the participation of CRV and Index Ventures. As part of the funding, Andresssen Horowitz general partner Martin Casado will now sit on Mashape's board of directors. Casado is well known in the networking world as one of the leading visionaries behind the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement. Casado was a co-founder of SDN vendor Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012.
“I believe the move to microservices is as broad a shift as the move to client server,” Casado wrote in a blog post. “As with that transformation, new technologies are now needed to provide infrastructure as the new generation of application development and deployment flourishes.”
Casado sees Mashape's Kong API gateway in particular as being a particularly well positioned technology. Kong is an open-source API gateway and microservice management technology.
Augusto Marietti, CEO and founder of Mashape, commented in a blog post that Kong has become the de-facto standard to manage, secure, and orchestrate internal APIs.
“It's the air traffic control for the cloud computing era,” Marietti stated. “We're proud of the fact that Kong is the most popular API repository on Github, managing thousands of APIs and billions of requests, and has now crossed 2 million downloads and grown monthly active instances 27x year over year.”
So what does the name ‘Mashape' actually mean?
According to the company, Mashape is a combination of the words “mash” and “ape”. Originally it was “mash” and “shape,” but apparently the company finds apes to be adorable.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
