Czech Apiary, an API design-platform company, has raised $1,6 million (1,19 Million Euro) in a seed round led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures and joined by Czech Credo Ventures and XG Ventures. Other notable investors in the round include former co-founder of Heroku James Lindenbaum and Salesforce.com SVP Adrian Kunzle. The company also counts Esther Dyson as the seed investor. The San Francisco-based company, which was founded by Jakub Nesetril and Jan Moravec, launched a public beta at the end of 2012 and has since gathered more than 25,000 APIs. Now, the team will use the newly-obtained funding to expand their engineering division to keep up with customer demand and to continue development of API Blueprint, an open-source tool for describing APIs.
Apiary is a Heavybit company based in San Francisco, but which maintains engineering operations in Prague. The company aims to help developers to quickly create and test APIs and then allow customers or teammates to test it out on a mock server. The service, which is free at the ‘hacker’ level and fee-based at the ‘team’ and ‘enterprise’ levels, allows users to sign up through GitHub or by email and to send their API through Apiary’s debugging proxy to obtain debugging reports. The service also offers Apiary Gem, a client which allows users to validate their API Blueprint, preview the documentation, and publish it to Apiary. Notable Apiary users thus far include GoodData (Nesetril was a long-time product manager there), Message Bus, Sent.ly, The Movie Database, and Tesla Model S.
