French startup Restlet announced it has closed a $2 Million round of funding from Siparex and CapDecisif Management. Founded by Jérôme Louvel & Thierry Boileau, the team also announced a third co-founder, Stève Sfartz, who will be based in the Silicon Valley along with Jerôme Lavel. The round of funding comes more than 8 years after Louvel started working on what became Restlet, an open source project called The Server Side, which ultimately became the first RESTful API for Java.
The team has come a long way since their open source beginnings, and the funding will go principally to develop their API PaaS APISpark – that’s a lot of acronyms, so let’s break it down.
If you believe what conferences like APIDays in Paris are saying about the future of Web 2.0, then you may agree that Application programming interfaces (APIs) will play a huge role in how the web communicates, and has already dictated the success of many fast-growing B2D (Business to Developer) or ‘platform’ startups.
With this in mind, the team at Restlet have developed APISpark. For API users, APISPark allows engineers to communicate with 1000s of APIs via a single API interface – an API of APIs, if you will. This may sound particularly familiar if you’ve been following LeCamping startup WebShell, co-organizer of the aforementioned APIDays.
Where Restlet makes its real mark, however, and differentiates itself from the competition, is that the same product can be used by teams who want to build & manage an API in the cloud. Companies like 1001Menus are already making available a Free API to their service for 3rd party developers in order to extend the value of what they can offer to their own clients, and Restlet wants to help every company build, deploy & manage their API Framework.
I must admit that I hadn’t heard much about this company until today, but it has all the signs of a French success story – a team composed entirely of engineers with more experience in the field than most anyone else in the field today, an innate creativity and technical innovation that puts them at least 12 months in front of the competition, if the competition should choose to replicate their features, and, of course, a $2 Million Seed Round never hurts.
Restlet CEO Jerome Louvel will be speaking at APIDays next month, so don’t miss out.
Did you like it? 4.5/5 (30)
