Zuplo, an API management startup founded by former engineering leaders at Microsoft and Auth0, announced a $9 million seed round led by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Founded in 2021, the Seattle-area startup helps companies accelerate the launch of their APIs, or application programing interfaces. It also offers tools to manage APIs for security and compliance.
The API management sector is expected to reach nearly $14 billion by 2027, and adoption of AI tools will likely accelerate usage.
“With the rapid growth of API usage, there is a great need for a highly scalable, cost efficient and multi-cloud API platform,” Yuval Neeman, managing director at Trilogy, said in a statement.
Zuplo is managing more than 4 billion API requests per month for a variety of businesses, including large enterprises and smaller startups. Its largest customer by volume is blockchain infrastructure company BlockDaemon.
There are various API management tools from tech giants like Microsoft and Google, along with a flurry of smaller competitors.
Josh Twist, co-founder and CEO, said Zuplo differentiates by focusing on developer productivity and offering a service that is easier to adopt and cheaper to use.
“Customers really love it because it’s flexible, it’s programmable, and it fits into the way their engineers work,” Twist said.
Twist previously was a product lead at Microsoft on the Azure team, helping start various services including Azure Logic Apps and Azure API Management, which is a competitor to Zuplo. He also led product teams at Meta and Stripe.
Zuplo co-founder Nathan Totten was an early employee at Auth0, the Seattle-area identification software company acquired by Okta last year. Totten also previously worked at Microsoft.
Zuplo employs 10 people. Other investors in the seed round include Boldstart, BoxGroup, as well as individuals such as former Auth0 leaders Eugenio Pace and Jon Gelsey, Snyk CEO Guy Podjarny, and BigID CEO Dimitri Sirota.
