Riverside Acceleration Capital’s Series B Investment in Gravitee

Gravitee is an emerging leader in the API management space, pioneering the unification of request-response with real-time APIs in a low-code productized and open-source software (OSS) platform that gives businesses effortless control over their entire API ecosystems. This is underpinned by a strong focus on security, governance, and observability that modern enterprises require. As you might imagine, there is much more on their website if you’d like to learn more.

 Our quote in the press release sheds some light on our excitement for Gravitee, but there is a lot more to unpack. First, there is a large, and still quickly expanding, market opportunity in front of the company. Second, we believe that Gravitee is well positioned to address the opportunity, and their product is positioned to deliver results for the portion of the market driving much of the growth (in our opinion). Third, the company is led by a stellar team, whom we're already enjoying our work with, that we feel truly understands the needs of both their large open-source software community and their impressive list of customers.  

 Let’s start with the market, which is evolving quickly. Full-lifecycle API Management is about a $3B market today (more for Gravitee if you include adjacent categories), based upon Gartner's prior estimates plus expected growth of 24% per annum. In our proprietary research, during investment due diligence, we’ve found that much of the market growth is being driven by organizations, and use cases, new to APIs and/or those who view APIs as a business enabler – rather than APIs as a business itself (for example, a company that sells or provides data to a customer and must get it to them). Gravitee’s platform is designed to suit these situations, which are propelling growth in the market, providing companies with an all-in-one, easy to use platform that reduces the complexity, time, and engineering toil otherwise required.

For context, Gravitee's platform helps organizations design, manage, secure, and govern both synchronous and asynchronous API ecosystems via an intuitive platform that takes minimal effort and technical expertise to operate. The platform allows organizations to do all the things one needs to do to publish an API, in a manner that suits them best – to design, document, publish, administrate, etc. – in an easy, secure, and coordinated way. It reduces the friction of API delivery and management, which saves time and energy for Gravitee users and customers.  Moreover, with the explosion in both the number and complexity of protocols, including synchronous and asynchronous communication, we believe organizations will increasingly turn to API management solutions such as Gravitee. Gravitee defines this next wave of API protocol complexity as ‘3.0,’ which requires organizations to serve the needs of an ever-demanding consumer base who expect to consume APIs ‘their way,’ while doing so across a disparate array of back-end technologies. 

To some extent, Gravitee democratizes the use of APIs - enabling organizations to leverage APIs to meet their business objectives with shorter development cycles and fewer resources and complications. This makes Gravitee an attractive option for both established engineering organizations looking for an efficiency/cost reduction tool, as well as for those newer to API development looking for an easy-to-use enabling platform.  

And there are many organizations across the continuum that already leverage Gravitee today. The platform began as an open-sourced effort back in 2015, and it remains one today, with a broad community of users, pulling from Docker over 350,000 times per month. We believe this community should continue to grow and remain vibrant, as the company plans to continue to further build upon its OSS. Meanwhile, Gravitee launched a paid version in 2019 that has blossomed into a full-featured enterprise edition today, purchased by an impressive list of enterprise and mid-market customers across a wide range of verticals. We believe there will be further growth of both the customer base and the platform as Gravitee continues to mature. Importantly, many of these customers, including large enterprises, are still ramping usage of APIs, and we believe their API publication will increase substantially in the years ahead.

 Finally, as noted above, we've been impressed by the executives at Gravitee. Led by Rory Blundell, we think the team is smart, hard-charging and extremely knowledgeable about this market. They truly understand the value-prop that Gravitee offers their customers and are working to further value-delivered every day. We are very much looking forward to working with them and are excited about the opportunity ahead for Gravitee.