Today Superface, which is building the successor to APIs, has announced raising a pre-seed investment from the German fund 42CAP, the Czech fund Tensor Ventures, and the development studio Applifting.
Founded at the end of 2019, the startup brings a revolutionary low-code solution to replace months of tedious work with autonomous integration and, subsequently, connect businesses within a fraction of a second. The startup’s long-term vision is to build a digital service marketplace for AI, and thanks to this funding, aims to finalize the product, expand its team, and start closed beta-testing in the first quarter of 2021.
“APIs are the foundation of the Internet, and the world of integrations is still extremely complicated. We can compare the situation to the era of telephone exchanges when operators would connect calls manually, and there were bundles of wires hanging on posts. Today, every application includes fifteen integrations on average, making APIs the digital backbone of every business. Our goal is to automate the API integration process – a path pioneered by one developer won’t need to be walked again by crowds of others. It’ll be possible to do this routine work in a fraction of a second thanks to our revolutionary approach, using three lines of code,” said Radek Novotný, Superface’s co-founder and CEO.
Superface’s long-term objective is an autonomous marketplace for AI. In the startup’s first phase, it is building a (super)interface that radically simplifies API integrations, reducing the API integration costs up to 99.9%.
A development team can spend several weeks integrating one API. That includes steps such as searching for the right API, contracting its provider, studying the documentation, developing the integration itself, testing and deploying, as well as never-ending maintenance. Often, the team needs to repeat every step to connect another service provider – whether it be because of backup or a better price. Regardless of the costs, APIs have become the cornerstone of digital business.
“As an investor, you seek solutions that are truly seductive in addressing a huge and staggering problem with breathtaking simplicity. The Superface team has not only created a true trailblazer for the API market. They deliver a compelling vision for the fundamental core of applications in the AI era. Zdenek and Radek combine a down-to-earth, straightforward approach with an ambitious vision for making it work on a large scale”, said Thomas Wilke, General Partner at 42CAP.
“We’ve been helping Superface tune up their product from the very beginning so that it was as attractive for developers as possible. We have created hybrid teams together, and we’re in charge of developing open-source components. I believe that this multi-field cooperation will help Superface reach their ambitious goal much faster,” said Vratislav Kalenda, Applifting’s CEO.