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Universal APIs serve as middleware that save developers from integrating one-by-one with individual platforms that their customers use. Instead, developers integrate once with the universal API which itself integrates with every platform.Â
- With Rutter, a universal API for commerce, don’t choose between supporting Shopify or WooCommerce merchants—support all merchants regardless of platform from day 1.
- With Finch, a universal API for payroll, don’t choose between supporting Gusto or Justworks customers—support all SMBs regardless of payroll system from day 1.
Universal APIs win based on their ability to aggregate developers by dramatically improving developer experience.
- Like AWS, they transform high fixed costs into variable cost subscription pricing, they save developers from doing repetitive and boring work, and they enable developer resources to be redirected to core, differentiated functionality.
- Like Segment, they get integrated into the code which makes them extremely sticky and hard to rip out, offering leverage as its integration library grows, while scaling with customer growth via usage-based pricing.
- Like Plaid, they reduce friction to onboarding more people and businesses into fintech-enabled products and services by juicing a cycle of innovation that enables both new apps (e.g., how Brex uses Plaid for bank connections) and new underlying platforms (e.g., how Brex Cash is a bank connection option on Plaid via it integrating with Plaid Exchange).
Remember that Plaid didn’t invent the concept of a universal API for bank connections. Yodlee had been aggregating banking data since its founding in 1999. Plaid made the product more accessible to developers, making it free to try, delivering it through a modern API and making it possible to get up and running in an afternoon.
That’s how it won Venmo, Robinhood and more—by dramatically improving the developer experience and abstracting away the messiness of connecting to the underlying APIs. It ignited developer creativity to build on top of its tooling and got indexed on the upside of a small handful of massive successes.Â
Jan & team
New & upcoming interviews
Reply to this email to offer questions you’d like us to ask upcoming interviewees, request specific interviewees and offer feedback.
New
- Jeremy Zhang, CEO of Finch: $3.5M Seed from General Catalyst to build a universal API for HR and payroll
- Thilo Huellmann, CTO of Levity: $1.7M Pre-Seed from Angular Ventures to build a verticalized Zapier for machine learning
Upcoming
- Andrew Hoag, CEO at Teampay: $12M Series A from Tribe Capital—talking to learn more about the intersection of card issuing and expense management
New company pages
Below are the company profiles we added last week:
- Forter
- Animoca Brands
- Neo4j
- Rec Room
- Voodoo
- BigID
- Bytedance
- Bolt
- Ro
- ConsenSys
- N26
- AngelList Venture
- Arctic Wolf
- Kraken
- Flexport
- Stripe
Reply to this email to let us know what other companies you’d like us to cover.
Product update: Autocomplete search
With the amount of research being added to the platform, we'd heard from users that navigating the site and finding specific documents could be slow. To speed it up, we've added an autocomplete search bar to the top of the main Sacra dashboard as well as every company page.
Let us know what other features you'd like to see on the platform by replying to this email!
