Moesif is assisting companies that offer API-first services to increase their market share.
The San Francisco startup announced Monday that it had raised $12 million in capital. It was led by David Sacks, and Arra Malekzadeh (Craft Ventures) as part of its Series A round. Moesif CEO Derric Gilling said that Merus Capital, the existing investor who led Moesifs seed round of $3.5 million in 2019, also participated.
Moesif was founded by Gilling Wang and Xing Wu in 2017. They also completed the Alchemist Accelerator program in 2018.
Gilling stated that companies looking for data about API usage and workflow had traditionally needed to create this capability in-house using a technology like Snowflake. The problem with this was that if someone needed a report they had to file a ticket and wait for a team to finish it. Companies also find it difficult billing customers accurately and managing when someone exceeds their rate limits.
People started to build on our platform and pull data from APIs. Gilling said that they began to get inquiries about how we could directly serve customers. For example, Gilling explained that they would let customers know if their rate limits are reaching. We began to develop new functionality and an option to customize the platform's look and feel.
Moesif offers self-service analytics, which can be accessed every day. It also has features that allow you to scale analytics more economically. It is used by customers to monitor API features and to identify issues. There are also additional capabilities that allow users to see who uses the API and how often they use it.
In addition to seeing its revenue increase by over 20% month-over-month this year, the company has also seen greater adoption from larger companies and more diverse use cases. Gilling stated that the company was still in the early stages of analytics and user trials at the time of the seed round. It boasts a client list that includes Symbl.ai, Tomorrow.io and Deloitte today.
Gilling anticipates that the new funding will be used to increase the company's workforce across sales, engineering, customer service, and developer relations.
He also wants to be a thought leader in this space.
Craft Ventures Malekzadeh will join Moesifs board as part of the investment. Gilling was recommended to her by a portfolio company. She felt that Moesif fitted into Crafts thesis about SaaS companies.
Malekzadeh is particularly interested in developer tools. While working as an API developer at a startup, she experienced firsthand the frustration of not knowing how APIs were used and how customers should be billed. She was constantly asking the engineering and product teams for reports.
Moesif was not around when she started her startup. Instead, her company had its own tools, which proved to be cumbersome and required the hiring of top engineers who didn't want to spend their time on building something other than the core product.
Malekzadeh said that although the founders are technically savvy, they also provided excellent content on their website which helped me learn more about them. Their uniqueness as a developer-first business is due to the fact that they can communicate in the same language as business users, despite being technically savvy. Their revenue growth was phenomenal, and their customer testimonials were amazing.
