Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.
The investment was led by Merus Capital with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, who sold his startup, Cruise Automation, to General Motors for $1 billion in 2016.
Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”
Heat map showing API usage by region. Screenshot: Moesif
The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.
Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, who use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often, and with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.
The product was released last year and Gilling says his company already has 2000 customers, which includes both the free and pay tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and FinTech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and InsideSales.
While the company currently consists of the three founders, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.
Moesif was founded in 2016, and the three founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.