Meet the French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs in your organization. The company automatically generates documentation for your APIs so that other teams can learn how to use certain APIs.
Over time, Bump will become a central repository for everything related to your APIs. It acts as a single source of truth, changing updates and logs so you can see what’s new.
This summer, the company raised $4 million (€4 million) in funding led by Galion.exe and the BPFrance Digital Venture Fund. Business angels also participated in the round.
An API is an application programming interface. Developers use APIs to allow two different services or applications to interact with each other. Companies also use APIs for their own internal use cases.
By relying on APIs, different teams can work on different parts of the same application. What they need to do is make sure they are using the APIs correctly to push changes or retrieve data from different product areas.
And that’s where Bump comes in especially handy. APIs break all the time. Development teams change some parameters, add features, improve behavior or deliver different results than expected.
“There are also small non-technical team members using APIs,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Charrier told me. “Product, developer relations or marketing people need to know what’s going on.”
That’s why Bump built a documentation generator for APIs. It works with both RESTful and message-oriented APIs, which makes it stand out from other solutions that focus on RESTful APIs.
You can integrate it into your workflow in different ways. For example, you can launch Bump using a GitHub action, use Bump’s command-line interface, or interact with Bump using Bump’s own API — yes, it’s an API for APIs.
The idea is that anyone in the company can start using Bump, although some teams do things differently. Once all APIs are registered on Bump, every time there is a change, Bump can send notifications and highlight changes compared to the previous version.
The result is that Bump will be an API portal for the entire company. When one joins the company, one can easily see the logic behind certain elements by browsing Bump’s hub.
When I spoke with Sebastien Charrier, he compared Bump’s approach to GitHub. You can always export your documents and leave the platform, but the great thing about Bump is that you can see all the variations. Next, the startup wants to turn the product into a collaboration platform. And this is what improves the stickiness of the product.
So far, 250 companies are actively using the product, such as Meilisearch, Memo Bank, Canopy Servicing and Forto. The startup plans to hire 20 people in the coming months.
