A new startup founded by Bazaarvoice and Dosh alums has raised $1.6 million and launched its new solution to monitor and manage APIs that companies use to make various applications interact with each other.
Hoss, which completed the Y Combinator accelerator earlier this year, quickly found its initial financial backing from Y Combinator, Funders Club, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Abstraction Capital, Lombard Street Ventures, Shipyard Capital, VentureSouq and angel investors.
CEO Matt Hawkins co-founded Hoss with CTO Cameron Cooper and Trung Vu last year. Hawkins and Cooper had met years prior, during in the early days of Bazzarvoice -- Hawkins said he was employee 30. Cooper previously led Bazaarvoice Labs, and he left the company to form a startup in 2008 called Socialware with Bazaarvoice's Chris Richter. They raised funding and hired Hawkins to lead sales and marketing efforts before being acquired by Proofpoint in 2016 for $9 million.
Cooper later worked with Vu at Dosh where Vu was a senior software engineer and Cooper was senior staff engineer.
In early 2019, the three started talking about issues with APIs. Almost every organization has continued to use more APIs to link together a growing number of third-party applications used to help consumers and apps interact seamlessly.
But APIs frequently encounter communication issues as new updates flow and developers tinker with new programming. And that can slow sales, sap efficiency and cut into revenue when customers hit dead ends or see delays -- and consumers are bound to blame the business they're working with instead of an esoteric line of code in an API.
"That's you having an outage," Hawkins told Inno. "They don't know the difference between you and an integration."
Many of these problems have grown in the past couple years with the expanded use of app integrations -- and that means Hoss has had to rapidly develop its product.
"We understand that speed is one of our competitive advantages as a startup," he said. "I'm less worried about other big technology companies that would try to do something like this. I'm more concerned about a new startup that sees the same spark in the world that we do and wants to take us head on."
After initial discussions in early 2019, Hoss built out its MVP in Q4 last year before landing a beta customer in December and joining the Y Combinator cohort in California. As the accelerator neared its end, the pandemic began, forcing San Francisco into lockdown and Y Combinator's Demo Day event to go online instead of its traditional in-person setting.
"It was interesting to say the least," Hawkins said of the transition during the pandemic.
Hoss, which now has nine employees, this month launched a free version of its platform to provide alerts about potential bugs in API integrations. It also launched a paid version that allows users to build teams within the platform and access more data and insights, along with integrations for Slack and PagerDuty.
"We're wholeheartedly convinced that almost every team that uses a lot of APIs has these pain points, so we're keeping it as open and broad as we possibly can," he said. "Every company is or will be an API driven organization."
Among Hoss's customers are Austin-based ZenBusiness and Snap Kitchen, as well as Handle.com.
Hawkins said both enterprise scale and small- and medium-sized businesses use sale, shipping, billing and marketing applications that use APIs, as well some custom-built APIs for SMS notifications and other communications.
"Most of those are pretty mission critical," Hawkins said. "When you have an issue with one of those, even if it's not a complete outage, it has a huge impact on your business."
Hoss believes it has an edge with its product, but typically he said businesses consider whether to build their own API monitors or to outsource it and save on the maintenance and development costs of in-house solutions.
"You've really had to build this type of thing in-house, to date," he said.
