Reining in API sprawl

W
elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Today I’m looking at a recent acquisition that shows the drive toward more resilient APIs. Also this week, a recent round that adds nuance to the market for substance abuse therapy startups. — Anna

Resilient APIs

Creating and distributing APIs might soon be easier: Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, is working on it.

“We’ve started by working on an important problem to me, one that I’ve faced a lot myself as a developer, which is really dramatically simplifying how developers are able to ship APIs to end users,” its CEO Sagar Batchu told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller.

However, large businesses with over 5,000 developers already struggle with API sprawl, according to a survey supporting API platform Postman’s 2023 State of the API Report. Thirty-one percent of respondents at these large businesses mentioned “managing too many APIs or microservices” as an obstacle to producing APIs, compared with just 23% of all survey-takers.

It’s not hard to see how this finding connects to Postman’s recently announced acquisition and upcoming integration of API observability startup ​​Akita Software. “Akita’s addition will make it easier than ever for users to manage their production APIs, even in the face of API sprawl,” its press release states.

According to Akita founder Jean Yang, the rise of APIs has fundamentally changed the software development process. “More and more testing has moved to production. Intended behavior is now based on observed behavior. More and more, the only way for teams to figure out even what’s running is by inspecting production. We need new tools that meet developers where they are: not just for building the first draft of software, but for debugging, maintenance, and the nth draft,” she wrote in her announcement.

On a related note, chaos engineering might no longer be the sole domain of site reliability engineers.