DEV Community: Radek Novotny

Superface to build the world's largest catalog of automated APIs. Investors back its vision in €2.6 million seed round.

Radek Novotny — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 06:58:49 +0000

Prague, October 10, 2022 – The technology startup Superface, which connects applications through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in a fraction of a second, has raised €2.6 million (CZK 65 million) in a seed investment round. Estonian equity fund Tera Ventures, led by Eamonn Carey, invested in the startup, whose ultimate vision is to create the world's largest catalog of automated APIs. The fund has already invested more than $67 million in successful tech projects around the world, including big startups like Montonio and Scoro. Superface’s other new investors in this round are Caesar Ventures, Quantum Angels, Startup Istanbul, as well as angel investors Nicolas Mohr, Michael Vath, and Siim Teller. In addition, Superface has again been backed by funds 42CAP and Tensor Ventures, whose portfolio includes blockchain-based platform Tatum and tech company Passengera.

The amount of time, effort, and money that companies spend on the search and integration of APIs is enormous. After meeting the Superface team, I immediately fell in love with the idea of eliminating all the complexity behind the process. The team’s vision of employing AI for autonomous integrations represents a pleasant change needed by founders and developers all around the world. Superface is creating something that will radically simplify the work of developers, and we are happy to take part in this journey, says Eamonn Carey, general partner of Tera Ventures.

The investment will help us focus on product-market fit and increase market traction. Along with the investment from Tera VC, we have also received capital from 42CAP, Tensor Ventures, and other expert angel investors interested in technology and marketing. Our thanks also go to Applifting for their continued support. At the moment, we are prioritizing integrations, with strong demand coming mainly from advanced startups. These startups often have more than a hundred API integrations on their roadmap, while the cost per integration can range from a thousand to tens of thousands of euros, depending on the complexity. Using Superface, startups can save significant amounts of money and work which can then be utilized for innovations in other areas, says Radek Novotný, CEO and co-founder of Superface.

This year we want to focus primarily on tuning the product for external integrations. Our ambition is to create the largest catalog of all public APIs — a kind of ‘Google of APIs‘. Developers will be able to search through our database based on an API’s purpose, selected parameters, and their connection in a few clicks. Developers won't have to do complicated searches for specific APIs in the documentation and perform many days of analysis. On top of this, we can also help large companies internally. With Superface, companies will have a clearer idea about the various APIs they use, adds Zdeněk Němec, CTO and co-founder of Superface.

Cost savings in tens of thousands of euros

Following this recent seed round, Superface’s new target group is mid-size and large companies. These usually carry a significant technical debt in the area of integrations and pass them on between internal teams. Superface helps them save both time and money on integrations, because it does not serve just as a middleman, but rather as an intermediary without charging fees to call APIs. One such example is Superface’s cooperation with Crowd.dev which registers about 2 million executions a week.

Superface currently has a team of 14 people, consisting of senior developers specializing in API development, integrations, and design. This team works mainly on public APIs. Next year, the startup plans to recruit up to 20 more people, primarily for technology, product, development, online marketing and commerce. In the future, Superface wants to focus on automation by integrating open APIs that will be searched, connected, and managed by algorithms and AI in the digital world. The AI itself will be trained on the current database built by Superface in conjunction with a global community of 1,200 developers.

Product trusted by investors and funds

In addition to 42CAP and Tensor Ventures, Superface was backed with EUR 1.3 million (CZK 34 million) by the Czech freelance development studio Applifting in the pre-seed phase. As a confirmation of their confidence in Superface, these funds provided capital in the seed phase.

The German fund 42CAP already has experience with similar startups. It is led by Thomas Wilke, who has successfully exited eCircle and Shine in the past. The deeptech fund Tensor Ventures boasts the blockchain platform Tatum and startup Aireen as part of its portfolio. Aireen specializes in diagnosing diseases of affluence using machine vision.

More about Superface

Superface is revolutionizing the API market. The path once trodden by a developer will no longer have to be repeated by legions of others, because machines will do the routine work for them. What they previously had to laboriously search, compare, and implement, Superface transforms into three lines of code. With its unique interface and open community, Superface allows developers to connect to any API in seconds. The end goal is to build a marketplace with fully automated purchasing of all digital services — done by artificial intelligence and with no human intervention required. All that with automatic maintenance capable of finding another suitable API provider in the event of a failure. The idea behind the Superface platform has attracted leading technology investors from Germany and the Czech Republic, funding from which has allowed the startup to recruit top technology experts and continue its rapid pace of development.

Less integrating, more community building: saving €40k on API integrations

Radek Novotny — Fri, 27 May 2022 13:06:37 +0000

Crowd.dev is an early-stage startup with a unique community building and management product for developer-first companies. Their growth and business model are dependent on a large amount of integrations. Instead of spending valuable time of their backend dev team, CTO Joan chose to handle integrations with Superface.

We met with crowd.dev at Web Summit Lisbon 2021, where founders Jonathan Reimer (CEO) and Joan Reyero (CTO) presented their vision of how crowd.dev could help manage developer communities. They are building a community management, growth, and engagement tool, by aggregating and acting on data from platforms where the community meets and interacts.

Crowd.dev’s founders are experts in this field, and have brought their expertise to the web service they offer for community-led companies.

Dependency on data

Crowd.dev's success relies on the amount of external data they are able to get from third parties. Their business is critically dependent on the amount of integrations. Even expert founders like Jonathan and Joan don't have many options today to handle integrations without having to hire backend developers.

Integration platforms (iPaaS) won't help them, because crowd.dev’s business requires a large amount of API calls which gets prohibitively expensive, as those platforms’ business models are based on the volume of usage.

Initially, Jonathan and Joan were considering the time-consuming and expensive processes of acquiring more development power in order to build integrations from scratch.

Cost and time per integration

Joan (CTO & founder) outlined a roadmap of required integrations that included categories such as: Social Media, Community Portals, Messaging Platforms, Development Tools and CRMs. Each category had at least 5 major players, each with different APIs.

All API integrations need to be prepared and tested thoroughly, as they are critical to crowd.dev business and its scaling. On average, the development of a single bespoke API integration takes 2-4 weeks, and the initial price can easily reach €1500. The price is even higher for mature companies.

In sum, Joan has to budget a minimum of €37,500 and 7 months of development, and that is a painful prospect. Not to mention, these figures do not include the expense of hiring a new backend developer, nor the long-term maintenance of these integrations.

Programming of API integration in 2022	Cost
Developer cost (Europe)	€6,000 / month
Time to develop one API integration	1–2 weeks of development
Cost of one API integration (medium complex API like Twitter)	€1,500–€3,000
Maintenance of one API integration	€1,000 / year

Simply put, integrations are expensive, don't scale, but at the same time, are essential to running crowd.dev’s business.

Fewer developers and more integrations

We provided Joan with a number of ready-to-use integrations in the form of Superface use cases, which give applications the capability to integrate autonomously. They were developed in Comlink, an open-source language we created specifically to make API integrations easier, faster, and more scalable.

However, Superface didn't support Twitter nor Discord at that time. Our Customer Success team has therefore developed these integrations and published them in the public catalog, meaning other companies can use them for free as well. It should be noted that both Discord and Twitter have a complex API, which most developers struggle to properly integrate. Thanks to the technology we have developed, it took a fraction of the effort and cost compared to the conventional method.

Thanks to Superface, the team can focus on building features rather than integrations, and we do not need to hire a developer just for talking to APIs.

— Joan Reyero, CTO, crowd.dev

Benefits of using Superface	Cost saving
Saved Developer cost (Europe)	€72,000 / year
Time to integrate (ready-made integration use case)	few minutes
Time to develop new integration use case	4–8 hours
Cost of developing new integration use case	€150–€300

Crowd.dev started using Superface in a test environment, and in production shortly after. Within minutes, they had Superface and relevant integration use cases installed and configured. As of now, Superface records more than 100,000 successful Comlink executions per day.

Report shows crowd.dev using Superface for 100k+ executions daily

Crowd.dev themselves developed an integration for Slack, and contributed it to the Superface catalog.

[Integrating] Slack was a breeze because we already had Discord, and Comlink is extremely easy to use.

— Joan Reyero, CTO, crowd.dev

Superface 💙 crowd.dev

Crowd.dev is developing a product worth checking out. It's currently in a closed beta version for registered users only – you can sign up for crowd.dev waitlist.

The professional approach and expert knowledge of its founders Jonathan and Joan make it a unique solution, whose integrations can now scale without limit, thanks to Superface.

What are self integrating applications?

Radek Novotny — Fri, 13 May 2022 14:24:55 +0000

I don't know a business owner who hasn't encountered API integration and got burned by the cost and delivery time. The cost of integrations today is very high. Have you justified to yourself why pay €1000 for a weather forecast integration when the service itself costs €20 per month? How can we entrepreneurs justify that distribution is more expensive than the product itself?

The average number of integrations in SaaS is 15 (in 2020). These companies would probably integrate much more than 15 if they could afford to. I know an early stage company with 66+ integrations in their roadmap. Companies are thus integrating only critical capabilities, which is severely hampering business in digital B2B.

Enterprises whose business model is dependent on the number of integrations must hire specialized integration teams or vendor-lock themselves with several Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS) and probably do both.

The main problem is the API interface, which is designed to be integrated by developers only. Simply put, there is no USB software in the digital world that allows for direct plug-and-play integrations.

API means programming

API (short for application programming interface) normalizes how two different pieces of software effectively talk to each other. The letter P in API represents programming. Developers manually wire up software to enrich their applications. Remember the days when all mobile phones had a different charging cable? Now imagine that for every phone on the planet, an engineer has to prepare a custom cable to get the phone to start charging. That is the state of integrations in 2022.

We know how much hot topic is Research & Development in the Profit & Loss reports. Integrations burn easily ⅓ of an R&D budget in emerging companies based on Superface calculations.

API always means labor

The job of an integration developer is to read non-standardized third-party API documentation, understand how that provider connects their digital capabilities to the API and what their product does (and doesn’t do) in the first place. After many attempts and a lot of preparation, after many days and weeks of tests, finally the developer implements the integration to the application.

Therefore, integrating is not scalable without hiring more developers (and their managers).

Self-integrating applications

Is there any magic to let software integrate with other software on its own? We need a universal integration interface which does the same job as what USB did for all devices on the planet.

Gartner recognized a new category in the Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies of 2021: Self-Integrating Applications.

Complex and growing applications and software portfolios mean that integration is becoming an intractable challenge for conventional delivery teams. Applications and software engineering leaders can look forward to a near future in which applications integrate themselves relatively seamlessly.

— Gartner: The Applications of the Future Will Be Founded on Democratized, Self-Service Integration

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2021 (source)

How to design self-integrating applications?

Consumer knows exactly what 3rd party capabilities are on the product roadmap for integration. Each capability has its use cases (for example, the messaging vendor capability is “send SMS”, the use case is “send premium SMS”).

To get rid of the dependency on developers labor, we require the software to understand the specification of a use case. The application must understand itself the business requirements that the product owner wants to integrate.

Thus, we write the use case descriptions primarily for understanding by the software. (Tech enthusiasts can see how we do this in Superface on our website. Here I will just mention that we built a special integration language for this – called Comlink. Geeks can check its documentation). Now the application understands the business task and is ready to get it from some provider.

In order for software to understand how to connect itself to a provider's capabilities, similar descriptions are needed on the provider side. This provider’s description matches the use case inputs and results and can be easily defined from API specification.

By having use cases and provider descriptions, we can then ask the integration-library to magically connect the service provider. The job of this library is to understand the use-case and understand how it is performed at the provider side.

Superface Client connecting directly (self-integrating) to the provider’s API

Benefits of self-integrating applications

The business benefits of self-integrating applications (in case use-case and provider descriptions are ready) are enormous.

Time to integrate the provider goes from a week to just hours, if not minutes.
Cost of the integration goes from €1000+ to €10+.
Integration is dynamic and reflects provider changes during upgrades or outages.
Multiple providers can be integrated at the same time (or easily replaced), avoiding a vendor lock-in with a single, expensive provider.
Service providers can be switched automatically based on business logic, such as service price or quality of the output.

As Gartner predicts in its report, it will take many years for companies to move from providing developer-specific integrations to providing universal integrations for self-integrating software.

In this article, I deliberately do not mention that an important part of integration is the business relationship, which consists of purchasing the required service from the provider, obtaining the necessary API keys, etc.

You can read how we look at the vision of B2B digital commerce where integration is a fundamental pillar on our website superface.ai.