Dealroom Raised €6 Million, Designing API Sequence Diagrams, Securing Large API Ecosystems
This is issue 2021.51 of the API Changelog, a weekly mix of API news, commentary, and opinion. In this issue, you’ll get to know the most relevant API-related information from the week of December 20, 2021. Subscribe now, so you never miss an issue of the API Changelog.
Funding and M&A
Salt Security, an API security company, is raising $120M–$150M at a valuation of $1.5B. Salt Security recently raised $70M in a Series C round. Advent Technologies led the investment, with participation from Y Combinator, Tenaya Capital, and Sequoia Capital, among others.
Dealroom, a venture capital data company, raised €6M in a Series A round. Beringea led the investment, with participation from Knight Venture Capital, and Shoe Investments, among others.
Numeral, a payment automation API, raised €13M in a Seed round. Balderton Capital led the investment, with participation from Kima Ventures, among others.
Intuit is acquiring Imvision for an estimated $50M. Imvision is an API security startup that has raised a total of $8M, with investors including Pitango, CE Ventures, and Elron Ventures.
Announcements
European Gaming reported that AstroPay launched a customizable API for merchants. AstroPay is an online payment solutions company that has launched the possibility to process withdrawals from an API that “adapts to the merchant’s requirements for security and velocity.”
Algolia, a search API, announced that they have served 12B searches to e-commerce customers during the cyber weekend. The announcement mentions that searches increased 5% YoY with the top categories being luxury goods & jewelry, apparel & fashion, and leisure.
iTranslate launched API integration for Snapchat’s Lens Studio. The new API “allows developers to create and publish lenses inside of Snapchat.” With the new API integration, developers will be able to do real-time translation in over 50 languages.
Forbes India published a story on Postman’s founder and CEO, Abhinav Asthana, showing how his company is “at the forefront of a massive shift, bringing world-class software products to customers around the world.” The piece goes through some of Postman’s history and highlights that “APIs have quickly become the fundamental building blocks of software used by developers in every industry.”
Fintech
Crowdfund Insider published a story announcing how Netherlands-based ABN AMRO introduced an IBAN-Name check API and made it available to partners. The story states that “by integrating the IBAN-Name Check API, companies can make their business processes a lot more efficient while minimizing the chance of errors and fraud.”
Nordigen, a free open banking platform, announced a partnership with Enty, a full-service company management tool. Finextra reported that “the integration with Nordigen’s account information service up-levels the platform by adding a new product to the mix — open banking. Enty users can now connect their business accounts directly to the system.”
Tartan wrote, “Payroll APIs will be the next frontier for lending.” The article explains how the loan process works and how credit underwriting is one of the most critical stages in the process. Directly accessing payroll data through APIs helps agile the whole process.
The Tech Panda reported on how the future of banking is in fintech automation. According to the article, “as the financial landscape is transforming with FinTechs, intelligent automation can restructure manual interventions and offer autonomous decision-making capabilities for process automation.”
The Payers ran an interview with Ciaran O’Malley from Trustly to go through the common questions about Open Banking. According to O’Malley, “Open Banking APIs have created a foundation for fintechs to access payment account data and initiate highly secure payments.”
Practice
Songtham Tung wrote “Designing Sequence Diagrams for API Orchestration.” Songtham explains what sequence diagrams are and where they fit in the API lifecycle. Then he points to tools that can help you in the process of creating the diagrams.
KeyDelivery published “10 Uses of Third-party Shipping & Tracking API Integration.” The article goes through the different use cases and highlights that “integrating the APIs of multiple carriers one by one is a long and inefficient process.”
Ferenc Almasi wrote “How to Get Started With GraphQL.” Ferenc explores the differences between GraphQL and REST and then explains how GraphQL works. The story continues with a step-by-step project that shows you how to create your GraphQL server from scratch.
Ashley Peacock wrote “How To Ensure Reliable Inter-Service Communication With Contracts.” Ashley starts by explaining what contracts are before getting to using OpenAPI. He shows different ways to validate OpenAPI contracts, including Spectral and Pact.
Tyler Eon published “REST and the future of APIs.” In the article, Tyler points out that there are multiple solutions outside of REST that you should consider. He says that “if your service primarily has non-browser clients, and especially if you are doing service-to-service communication, REST is definitely less useful.”
Security
Michał Trojanowski, a Product Marketing Engineer at Curity, wrote “Securing Large API Ecosystems.” In the article, Michal makes a clear difference between breadth-grown and depth-grown APIs. He points out that “when securing APIs, solutions that work for small deployments may be insufficient in larger ecosystems.”
