Trilogy

Pictured: Zuplo CEO and co-founder Josh Twist (center) with Elisa La Cava (left) and Yuval Neeman (right) of Trilogy Equity Partners. Not pictured: Zuplo CTO and co-founder Nate Totten.

Announcing Zuplo: The API Gateway Developers Love

Over a decade ago, before the cloud explosion, software applications largely used a monolithic architecture where all software functions were self-contained on a single code base. With the advent of cloud computing in conjunction with applications’ increased usage of data and data sharing, many applications have transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices infrastructure, separating out single features or business logic and allowing for direct, simple, and efficient data exchange via an application programming interface, or API. Now, 10-plus years on, this microservices architecture has become so popular that according to some sources, API traffic represents approximately 80% of data shared over the internet.

How a company manages its APIs is largely a strategic decision. Companies that are API-first (think: Stripe, Okta, and Twilio) can use a gateway to monetize their API traffic. These same companies place high priority is ensuring strong security practices are established and followed, which can also be supported via a third-party gateway platform. Large applications may now manage 100s of different services and APIs through a gateway; however, most gateways have not kept up. Most gateways currently on the market were built over 10 years ago and have had to develop workaround architectures to adapt to today’s high-volume, microservices-heavy environment. These first-generation architectures lead to increased cost, increased latency, and difficult management, thus creating an opportunity for a next-generation player.

Zuplo, founded in 2021, is a next-gen API Gateway and API Management layer. It offers a single pane of glass to manage the consistency of APIs and security compliance, as well as provide centralized documentation and discovery, all in anticipation of today’s scale of micro-service usage. Unlike incumbent solutions, Zuplo is natively both serverless and multi-cloud, as well as edge compute functional, making it ready for where customers are going, not where they’ve been. Customers are passionate about Zuplo because it is easy to integrate, is fully managed, and scales with workloads globally in an extremely cost-efficient way.

The company is led by co-founders Josh Twist and Nate Totten. Josh, the CEO, has led a career in technical product management where he notably led the creation of Azure Mobile Services and Azure API Management at Microsoft, with stints at Facebook Analytics, Facebook Music, Instagram Reels, and Product for Payment Methods at Stripe. Nate, CTO, was a Program Manager on the Azure portal, as well as was employee number 15 at Auth0. He also held engineering and product roles at Salesforce.

The co-founders have built the product with a developer-first mindset, inspired by the CEO’s time at Stripe, the CTO’s role as a founding engineer at Auth0, and both co-founders having worked in developer-centric product and engineering roles over the course of their careers. They designed Zuplo such that its workflow is familiar to developers in how developers implement features and work with source code, and in how they integrate and expose their code to Zuplo, which makes using Zuplo very appealing to developers.

Developers are already flocking to Zuplo. Zuplo currently manages nearly 5 billion API calls per month for its customers and is growing quickly. It’s easy for developers to get started using Zuplo – they offer both a self-serve model where you can sign up using a credit card and start using Zuplo immediately, as well as enterprise-grade contracts that include their complete suite of capabilities.

We are thrilled to lead Zuplo’s funding round and, together with Boldstart Ventures and a handful of strategic angel investors, help Zuplo announce $9 million in seed funding.

At Trilogy, we believe in backing startups that are innovating in large categories. Zuplo’s approach, made possible by their significant investment in building novel and extensible platform architecture, allows them to serve mid-market and enterprise customers alike. And they are just getting started.

Thank you to Josh, Nate, and the entire Zuplo team for your partnership. We are excited to be on this journey together.

By Yuval Neeman & Elisa La Cava