A new company is taking a leaf out of Stripe’s API playbook with a platform that makes it easy for any company to create transparent API documentation, while also allowing non-technical team members to contribute to the process.
Exhibiting as part of the Battlefield 200 lineup at TC Disrupt this week, TechCrunch caught up with Theneo to find out how they plan to tap into the $4.5 billion API management market — a figure expected to rise to nearly $14 billion in five years. .
APIs, or “application programming interfaces,” are the glue that holds most modern software together. They’re what allow Uber to offer in-app messaging without having to build an entire infrastructure from scratch, fitness apps to support payments through Stripe, maps and online merchants to view your running history. Internally, companies create their own APIs to connect all kinds of back-end systems and data stores.
In short, APIs are the hidden, often unsung heroes of the modern technology age. But creating an API that’s easy to use and adopted by developers comes with inherent challenges. It’s not enough to just build an API – its features, functionality, and deployment instructions must be documented and presented in an easy-to-follow format. Getting the API documentation right is crucial, which is where Theneo hopes to make its mark.
Sample API documentation from Theneo. Image Credits: Neo
Stripe-like API documentation
According to Theneo co-founder and CEO Anna Robakize, who has previously led an engineering team and developed hundreds of APIs, quality API documentation is often lacking.
“I have personally seen the impact API documentation has on our project deliverability, cost and efficiency,” said Robakize. “Because of this, as a team leader, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort looking for a tool to help us create good API documentation – similar to Stripe, which is considered one of the best in the industry. The problem with most tools is that they’re time-consuming or have too many limitations.” it is.
The root of the problem, Robakize says, is that developers aren’t necessarily technical writers — “they’d rather create another API than document,” she said. Therefore, many internal APIs in particular (developed to connect an organization’s internal systems and applications) will either be completely undocumented, or if they are documented, they will not match and match. This issue is exacerbated when developers move in and out of a company, often leading to unmanageable confusion.
“Theneo was created out of frustration, with the goal of making it easier to quickly generate and maintain high-quality API documentation,” said Robakize.
With Theneo, developers link their GitHub repository or upload their API collection, and Theneo then analyzes everything and provides the required API documentation. It also offers an AI assistant that uses natural language processing (NLP) to improve the documentation, including automatically defining various API features, basically the API specification parts that developers need to request, send, and delete data, and so on. . So a “Create Client” object, for example, contains different attributes each so that the user (ie, the developer) knows exactly what the attribute is.
“Our AI assistant prepares descriptions for these fields, which often take a developer or technical writer a lot of time to create, especially when there are thousands of fields in your API,” Robakize explained.
Theneo: Sample API documentation showing fields/attribute definitions. Image Credits: Neo
While Theneo is designed to automate the process as much as possible, it doesn’t provide prepackaged API documentation entirely out of its own free will—it acknowledges that developers and other team members will need to adjust formatting and wording. More images or what is needed.
“We analyze the API, we analyze it, and we come back with an API document that’s already well-structured,” Robakize said. “The user can choose whether or not to add additional details, such as images and various API widgets, and can add team members and collaborate.”
While the engine underlying Theneo is the same across both internal and external APIs, the company offers additional functionality for the latter, admitting that third-party developers will appreciate the easy-to-follow slider interface. So this is basically a white label product that can be customized and branded as per the company’s requirements.
In terms of pricing, Theneo currently has a basic plan that costs about $20 per user per month, rising to $45 per month for unlimited API projects on the Business plan. It also offers an enterprise plan that unlocks features like custom branding and self-hosting capabilities. Although Robakize says this isn’t ready for prime time yet, it’s also working on a completely free version.
Anna Robakidze, co-founder and CEO of Theneo.
Financial support
The Y Combinator (YC) graduate has raised $1.5 million in early seed funding since its founding just over a year ago, and confirmed this week that it is in the process of raising more funding. And Robakize unveiled an improved document editor that he describes as something akin to “Figma for APIs,” designed for everyone involved in a software project to contribute, regardless of technical ability.
“We understand that there are multiple players in building APIs or API documentation, and collaboration is critical for these users,” Robakize explained. “Similar to what Figma did with collaboration, our API document editor allows users to collaborate, so administrators and non-technical members can easily work together on content and produce high-quality documents.”
Robakize said the company is open to working with any type and size of business and currently works with 3,000 companies, from fintech and government agencies to agricultural companies.
“Our biggest customers are usually fintech companies with 20-plus developers,” Robakize said.
It’s somewhat fitting that Theneo sees a special focus in fintech, as it looks to be one of the biggest fintech startups to emerge in the last decade. Stripe is well-known for its payment processing API used by startups and big tech companies, including Google and Amazon, and the documentation it provides plays a part in why it’s popular with developers.
“One of the reasons I love working on Stripe integrations is that their API documentation is very well organized, has a well-thought-out user interface, and generally makes it easy for developers to find the information they need to integrate with them,” said Robakize. And because of how challenging it was to find, it often took me twice. Developers respect Stripe’s API documentation, so we want to make sure other businesses and developers can generate the same high-quality documentation.
