Speakeasy is using AI to automate API creation and distribution

Just about every developer wants to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, but creating and documenting an API is a time-consuming process. Speakeasy, an early-stage startup, wants to make that an easier and more automated set of activities.

Today, the company emerged from stealth with a $7.6 million seed investment.

Speakeasy co-founder and CEO Sagar Batchu describes his startup as an API infrastructure company, and that means it’s building tools to make it easier to create and distribute APIs, something that is near and dear to him as a developer himself. “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,” Batchu told TechCrunch.

He sees APIs giving developers a kind of superpower. “As developers, APIs allow us to take advantage of another company’s capabilities. And so making it really easy to ship those APIs to developers means that we can really help companies accelerate how their products are adopted, as well as we reduce the burden on developers when they integrate with those APIs,” he said.

While the goal is to build a platform of features eventually to help with that mission, the company is starting with two tools, one to help developers create the APIs, and one to help their users implement them more easily.

The first piece is called Managed SDKs. Developers provide an Open API spec, and Speakeasy uses AI to help build a complete API for you along with the necessary documentation, reducing the amount of time it takes to complete a task like this to minutes.

“Speakeasy uses AI to validate and enhance the spec, creates SDKs in the most popular languages, and publishes automatically to package managers. It takes minutes to set up, and SDKs are updated every time the spec changes – saving developers significant time,” the company explained.

The second piece is designed to help the developer end user implement that API without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, creating a package using HashiCorp’s popular Terraform tool.

“With Speakeasy, API producers can, for the first time, easily create and maintain Terraform providers from an OpenAPI specification – dramatically reducing engineering burden, while unlocking an entirely new developer community,” the company said.

The startup currently has nine employees, but is hiring engineers to help build out the platform further. As he builds the company, Batchu believes being remote will help him find a more diverse workforce. “So first of all, I think about how adopting a remote-friendly hiring philosophy means that we’ll be able to access more places, more diverse communities. It’s definitely something really important to us. And as we move forward, we will be looking to hire great talent from everywhere,” he said.

Today’s round was led by GV with participation from Quiet Capital, Flex Capital, StoryHouse Ventures and Firestreak Ventures. Last year the company raised an additional $3.3 million in a pre-seed round led by Quiet Capital with participation from a host of prominent industry angel investors.

The Managed SDK piece is generally available starting today. The Terraform piece is available in beta.