INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
segment to-date has been the shift towards software as a service or SaaS.SaaS has dramatically lowered the intrinsic total cost of ownership
for adopting software, solved scaling challenges and taken away the burden of issues with local hardware
operations.Today, SaaS adoption is increasingly ubiquitous
infrastructure already in the cloud
While this software explosion has created a whole range of downstream impacts, it has also caused software developers to become more and
more valuable.The increasing value of developers has meant that, like traditional SaaS buyers before them, they also better intuit the value
of their time and increasingly prefer businesses that can help alleviate the hassles of procurement, integration, management, and operations
Developer needs to address those hassles are specialized.They are looking to deeply integrate products into their own applications and to do
so, they need access to an Application Programming Interface, or API
Best practices for API onboarding include technical documentation, examples, and sandbox environments to test.APIs tend to also offer
For these and other reasons, APIs are a distinct subset of SaaS.For fast-moving developers building on a global-scale, APIs are no longer a
efforts on creating a differentiated product?Thanks to this mindset shift, APIs are on track to create another SaaS-sized impact across all
industries and at a much faster pace
By exposing often complex services as simplified code, API-first products are far more extensible, easier for customers to integrate into,
and have the ability to foster a greater community around potential use cases.Graphics courtesy of AccelBillion-dollar businesses building
companies have built their businesses on the backs of these scalable developer services that let them abstract everything from SMS and email
to payments, location-based data, search and more.Simultaneously, the entrepreneurs behind these API-first companies like Twilio, Segment,
independent API-first company
Stripe took off because of its initial laser-focus on the developer experience setting up and taking payments
It was even initially known as /dev/payments!Stripe spent extra time building the right, idiomatic SDKs for each language platform and
out a PDF and set up a separate merchant account before getting started
Once sign-up was complete, users could immediately test the API with a sandbox and integrate it directly into their application
Even pricing was different.Stripe chose to simplify pricing dramatically by starting with a single, simple price for all cards and not
breaking out cards by type even though the costs for AmEx cards versus Visa can differ
Stripe also did away with a monthly minimum fee that competitors had.Many competitors used the monthly minimum to offset the high cost of
Stripe flipped that on its head
Developers integrate Stripe earlier than they integrated payments before, and while it costs Stripe a lot in setup and support costs, it
pays off in brand and loyalty.Checkr is another excellent example of an API-first company vastly simplifying a massive yet slow-moving
Very little had changed over the last few decades in how businesses ran background checks on their employees and contractors, involving
a variety of disparate verification sources and allows these companies to plug Checkr into their existing on-boarding and HR workflows
similar value prop to applications in need of banking data and connections, abstracting away banking relationships and complexities brought
upon by a lack of tech in a category dominated by hundred-year-old banks
Plaid has shown an incredible ramp these past three years, from closing a $12 million Series A in 2015 to reaching a valuation over $2.5
billion this year.Today the company is fueling an entire generation of financial applications, all on the back of their well-built
Braintree eventually sold to, and became an integral part of, PayPal as it spun out from eBay and grew to be worth more than $100 billion
Unsurprisingly, it was shortly thereafter that our team decided to it was time to go big on the category
By the end of 2014 we had led the Series As in Segment and Checkr and followed those investments with our first APX conference in
2015.Plaid, Segment, Auth0, and Checkr had only raised Seed or Series A financings! And we are even more excited and bullish on the space
To convey just how much API-first businesses have grown in such a short period of time, we thought it would be useful perspective to share
around SaaS, we believe that one will continue to develop around APIs
Given the amount of progress that has happened in just a few short years, Accel is hosting our second APX conference to once again bring
together this remarkable community and continue to facilitate discussion and innovation.Graphics courtesy of Accel
