RapidAPI raises $25 million to grow its API marketplace

RapidAPI, an online marketplace where developers can discover application programming interfaces (APIs), has added a further $25 million to its series B round of funding, doubling the figure it announced last June. Existing investors, including Microsoft’s M12 and Andreessen Horowitz, participated in the round.

Founded in 2014, San Francisco-based RapidAPI helps developers find, test, and connect to thousands of public APIs, covering everything from web search and weather to sports results and breaking news. As with many other digital services, RapidAPI said it has seen a “significant developer response” to the COVID-19 pandemic, with users turning to its marketplace to integrate relevant coronavirus APIs into their own applications, covering data sets, statistics, financial information, and news.

Between March 1 and now, the company said the top five COVID-19 APIs had more than 224 million calls, with a peak of almost 4.5 million in a single day.

Many organizations and companies have created apps and services throughout the COVID-19 crisis, and APIs play a pivotal role. A slew of crowdsourced coronavirus tracking apps have emerged, for example, while health bodies such as the U.K.’s NHS have launched their own APIs to let developers integrate official health advice into their own apps. Apple and Google also formed a landmark partnership to develop a contact tracing API to help track the spread of COVID-19, though this won’t be made available to the general public.

RapidAPI has now raised $62.5 million since its inception, and with its latest cash injection it said it’s well-financed to “bring new developers and API providers” to its marketplace and invest in new features for its Enterprise API Hub platform, a white label version of RapidAPI that companies can use to create private marketplaces for internal APIs or external API subscriptions.

Countless companies have built substantial businesses off the back of APIs, including the likes of Twilio and tech juggernauts such as Google, which makes its various technologies available for third-party developers to include in their own apps. As every company essentially becomes a software company, APIs make it more feasible for them to build feature-rich apps without having to develop every piece of functionality from scratch.