Why Executive Interest In APIs Is Booming

Almost everyone is doing the API economy wrong | TechCrunch

It’s time to hold companies to a higher standard when it comes to APIs. As software "eats the world," it seems like it’s not enough for a business to just serve its customers and hopefully make a profit, they also have to be “platforms” -- and, as any developer would respond, these days you just can’t be a platform without an API.

A primer on the reality of working with APIs as a new developer

A rundown of some of the issues and realities you'll find moving from education to real-world applications involving APIs.

Below the API

Jobs increasingly fall into one of two categories: Either you tell computers what to do for a living or they tell you what to do.

Optimised API Management for the modern business

Join us as we unveil the path to optimised API management, tailored for modern enterprises.

Replacing Middle Management with APIs by Peter Reinhardt

There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services employ armies of human workers, optimizing their output, productivity and quality while driving price down.

API Integration

Learn about pre-built automation tools and integrations to help your business stay ahead of the curve and deliver IT-as-a service.

The API-as-a-marketplace - Version One Ventures

As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace. What is an API-as-a-marketplace? Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides: suppliers and buyers. But, the interface is different.  In a traditional marketplace, discovery and […]

Jobs below the API

Back in February, Peter Reinhardt published his fairly widely circulated blog post Replacing Middle Management with APIs. (If you haven’t read it already, do so now.)

GGV Capital API-First Index

At GGV Capital, we are focused on finding the most promising developer-first software companies commercializing APIs, having already backed Agora, Authing, Pinwheel, Mindee and Stream. We are going all-in on API companies because they will fundamentally simplify software development. APIs will allow developers to offload lower-value and time-consuming components of application development so they can focus on higher-value work. For example, instead of a company asking its developers to spend months writing code to accept payments for its software, they can get up and running quickly with Stripe. For authentication, they can use Auth0. For chat, they can use Stream.We expect the use of APIs to continue growing exponentially in the next few years, and many promising companies are building with an API-first approach, including Algoia for search, Mux for video, and Commerce Layer for e-commerce. The public markets are also taking notice. Twilio and Agora are now publicly traded. Okta acquired Auth0 for $6.5B. SoFi acquired Galileo for $1.2B. We expect this trend to continue.2023 Q2 Update Highlights 1) Investment activity continues at a slower pace in Q22) Cohere raised one of the largest funding rounds of Q2 at $270M 3) Two additions to the API-First Index: Clerk & LibLab‍2023 Q1 Update Highlights1) Slower investment activity continues in Q1 2023 2) Stripe raised one of the largest funding rounds of 2023 at $6.5B3) Two additions to the API-First Index: Finch & SyncteraIn 2022, we tracked VC deal activity for 120+ API-first companies across categories. Find out what we learned:2022 Year in Review Report.‍‍GGV Capital is tracking 150+ API-first companies. We have now expanded the API-First Index to include the 60+ private companies that have raised $50M+ in funding. With this Index, we are focusing on API-first companies and have not included the broader and flourishing API economy (but are also very excited about this, having backed Kong and Tray.io!). If you are building API-first, we would love to meet you! Please contact us at apifirstindex@ggvc.com to be included in our list.

Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption

In this report, we document patterns of Claude usage over time, in 150+ countries, across US states, and among businesses deploying Claude through the API. Based on a privacy-preserving analysis of 1 million conversations on Claude.ai and 1 million API transcripts, we have four key findings: (1) Users increasingly entrust Claude with more autonomy, with directive task delegation rising from 27% to 39% in the past eight months. (2) Claude usage is geographically concentrated with high income countries overrepresented in global usage relative to their working age population. (3) Local economic considerations shape patterns of use both in terms of topic and in mode of collaboration with Claude. (4) API customers use Claude to automate tasks with greater specialization among use cases most amenable to programmatic access. To enable researchers and policymakers to further study the impact of AI on the economy, we additionally open-source the underlying data for this report.

AI Becomes the UI: When business logic moves to the AI tier, dashboards fade, and agents become the interface

In 2025, the Innovation Office at ServiceNow underwent the first phase of its transformation to study and produce original, future-forward research and thought leadership around AI business transformation, the future of work, quantum, the future of industries, smart spaces, and prototype innovative possibilities never imagined on the ServiceNow platform.

Comforting Myths - Infrequently Noted

I've been hearing confusing reports of Apple's openness to collaboration on challenging APIs so often that either my priors are invalid, or something else is at work. To find out, I needed data.

Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursor

A peek into where software engineering is headed from inside the sector’s leading AI labs. Agents running in the cloud are a major trend, while coding harnesses are spreading beyond the craft

Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.

Reddit API controversy

In April 2023, the discussion and news aggregation website Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface (API), a feature which had been free since 2008, causing a dispute. The move forced multiple third-party applications to shut down and threatened accessibility applications and moderation tools.