WunderGraph raises $3M in seed funding to build GitHub for APIs
Tags: startup, webdev, programming, opensource
Published: 2023-05-16 13:00:00


![Me Raising Money](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/kpb0ozzmjghexqupcquz.png)

Today we are excited to announce that we have raised $3M in seed funding led by Aspenwood Ventures to take API development to the next level.

It's actually been a while since the investment was made,
but we wanted to wait until we had a few things in place before we made the announcement.

## Why WunderGraph?

There's an ongoing trend in the industry to move away from monolithic applications to smaller services.
In addition, more and more (Saas) companies go API-first and offer their services as APIs,
or are moving in this direction.
Acronyms like MACH (Microservices, APIs, Cloud-native, and Headless) try to describe this trend.

While it's great to be able to compose a stack of best-of-breed solutions, this movement is not without its challenges.
How do you integrate a headless CMS with a payment provider, a CRM, 30 internal REST & GraphQL APIs,
and a dozen of third party APIs?

## APIs as Dependencies - A fundamentally new way to develop and compose APIs

We found that every company is facing the same challenges when it comes to integrating APIs,
and they all solve them in the same way: Everybody invents their own custom integration layer.

We've asked ourselves why this is the case, did extensive research and talked to hundreds of companies.
The answer is simple: What's missing is a standardized way to integrate & compose APIs.

**What's missing is a fundamental change in the way we think about APIs.**

> Treating APIs as dependencies makes them composable like npm packages.

What's obvious to code needs to be applied to APIs as well.
We use npm/Cargo/Go Modules to package, share and import code dependencies.

WunderGraph is bringing this concept to APIs.

## Docker / npm for APIs is really just the beginning

We sometimes call ourselves the package manager for APIs,
but this is just the beginning.

Think about what Docker did for applications.
It made it possible to package, share and run applications in a standardized way.

We apply the same concept to APIs.
Packaging, sharing and composing APIs in a standardized way will enable a whole new level of collaboration and innovation.
We're laying the foundation for a flourishing ecosystem of APIs.

## We're at the Git stage of building the GitHub for APIs

At this moment, we're at the Git stage of building the GitHub for APIs.

If we translate this to the Containerization analogy,
the WunderGraph SDK is the Dockerfile for APIs,
while our "WunderGraph Server" is the Docker Daemon,
the API Integration Engine.

Together with hundreds of companies and thousands of developers,
we've stabilized this foundation and are reaching a stable WunderGraph 1.0 release very soon.

As of today, you can easily compose REST/OpenAPI/GraphQL APIs together with Databases and other services.
We've built powerful frontend framework integrations for React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Relay, Astro, Remix, Nuxt, Expo, and more.

Compose the stack you want, deploy anywhere, in the cloud, on-premise, or locally.

## WunderGraph Cloud - The All-in-One Solution for API Development

Speaking of deployments,
we've been able to build a fully managed cloud solution to run WunderGraph Environments for you in less than a year.

It's important to note that this is not just a simple hosted version of WunderGraph.
It's a batteries-included end-to-end solution for API development.

All you have to do is to connect a GitHub repository, and you'll get Preview Environments for every Pull Request,
Distributed Tracing from Edge to Origin using OpenTelemetry,
Monitoring, Logging, and more out of the box.

## Try it out

If you're keen to try out WunderGraph,
check out our [Getting Started Guide](https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/getting-started) or use one of the templates available on [WunderGraph Cloud](https://cloud.wundergraph.com/).

If you'd like to learn more, get a demo, or just chat with us,
feel free to [book a meeting with me](https://wundergraph.com/meet/jensneuse).
I'd love to hear from you, discuss your use cases, and see how we can help you.

## What's next?

**Phase 1** of our mission was to stabilize the SDK and the WunderGraph Server,
making open-source API composition a reality.

**Phase 2** was to build a fully managed cloud service so you can deploy APIs in minutes without getting distracted by infrastructure and DevOps tasks.

**Phase 3** was to build enough momentum in the community and onboard large scale companies onto the WunderGraph stack to prove the core use cases and smooth out the rough edges.

We're progressing faster than we expected with this phase,
as we were able to build a lot of momentum recently.

That's why we're now heading into **Phase 4**,
turning our attention to API developer collaboration.

We're excited to announce that we're beginning to work on "WunderGraph Hub",
a platform to bring developers together to collaborate on APIs.

WunderGraph Hub will allow you to...
- ...share APIs as easy as npm packages
- ...discover and integrate APIs easily
- ...collaboratively design, build, and evolve APIs
- ...understand the impact of changes to APIs
- ...track which APIs depend on which other APIs

All of this will work similar to GitHub,
where you can have public and private APIs,
create issues and get notified about changes to APIs.

But that's really just the beginning.
We're excited to see what the community will build on top of WunderGraph Hub.
Stay in touch on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jensneuse_de) or join our [Discord](https://wundergraph.com/discord) Community to stay up to date.