API first, make backend great again! Or, why we invested in Treblle

We’re rounding out 2021 and ringing in 2022 with another announcement, this time, of our investment in Treblle. We’re very excited to lead the €1.2m Seed round of the London-headquartered/Zagreb based start-up and join Vedran, Darko, and Tea on their push to modernise the API ecosystem and make working with and understanding how your APIs are performing in real-time a breeze.

Meet the amazing faces behind Treblle

Power of APIs

API that magical acronym that every start-up and tech company uses in their pitch-decks, on their websites, and when explaining how simple it is to integrate with their solution. It’s fast, powerful, and dare I say it, sexy (as far as that ever counts for tech).

First, some quick math: tell me how often you have heard that a company was “API first” or “it’s super easy to integrate via our API”, multiply that number by a factor of 5–10x for a start-up, and you will have the number of developers that are doing countless manual tasks to set up and maintain these APIs behind the scenes, who usually fail to simply debug and re-create issues that some of their clients are facing, and who are stuck explaining their ‘self-explanatory’ API documentation to a third party that is trying to build an integration to it.

Your devs are wasting over a third of their time on avoidable, manual tasks

The flipside of APIs being so customisable and often specific to a project, is that they can easily become burdensome and overwhelming over time, and this is the primary reason most app and API developers claim that they spend a good third of their time on these manual tasks.

API calls represented over 80% of all web traffic

At the same time in this interconnected, cloud dominated world, APIs rule everything around us ($$ bill y’all); in 2018 API calls represented over 80% of all web traffic (you can imagine how that number just keeps creeping up as our services become more and more interconnected). As Uncle Ben famously told Peter Parker in Spider-Man ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, and with most of the internet, public, and private traffic relying on well-functioning APIs, you can imagine the negative consequences in case you encounter a malfunctioning or badly coded API request.

APIs are literally everywhere and Oprah would be proud

Although everyone knows the importance of and heavily relies on APIs, most companies do not know how their APIs are functioning in real-time until they encounter an issue, at which point they go into active firefighting mode. Given how most back-end and front-end integrations are built, there are serious concerns and potential risks that companies face on a daily basis, as can be seen in the following, highly accurate and technical schematics:

Exhibit A: State of the art Front/Back end integration

Exhibit B: A typical Front/Back end integration

That’s where Treblle comes in: Vedran and Darko have built an end-to-end real-time API monitoring and error-tracking solution, that seamlessly sits directly on your code, works across the entire API lifecycle, and saves your developers time while increasing API observability and understanding.

Features of Treblle

Treblle provides the following for all your APIs and endpoints without impacting performance of the host or the API in the slightest:

• Real-time API monitoring — see how your APIs are being used and performing
• Logging and error tracking — shows you all issues as they appear in real-time, groups them in order of priority and bundles them on underlying causes
• Auto generation and maintenance of your API documentation
• API analytics and quality score — identifies issues and suggests improvements to your APIs
• API testing, as well as capability to re-test existing issues with one click of a button
• Potential to control features and toggle your API automatically depending on how it is being used and performing
• Currently supports 12 languages incl.: PHP, Laravel, Node, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Koa, GO, Java, and Strapi (with many more in the works)

It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual developer, a small start-up, or a large enterprise that needs to own, understand and control their APIs, Treblle has you covered.

It’s extremely straightforward and simple to use, and you can be live within a few minutes. Why not try it out via their interactive demo on their website: https://www.treblle.com

Hard to show the magic behind the scenes, but there is an interactive demo on the website

Why we love it:

The ease of use, massive process improvements and transparency that Treblle provide are a few of the key reasons to have invested in the team. In the words of Shawn Wayans in Scary Movie — “But wait, there is more”:

1. Developer-centric solution: All other solutions, regardless of whether they are an incumbent or one of the larger tech start-ups that developers use to work with APIs (but shall not be named here) are supposedly targeted at the developer, but in most cases are still not entirely automating many of the manual tasks such as API documentation, instead they are providing useful tooling to slightly improve the process. Given the team’s personal background working with APIs and on 100s of front-end/back-end projects set out with the vision of a large step change rather than an incremental solution: what if their solution could automate away all manual tasks required of API developers, and empower the developer to truly focus on the core of their job instead?
2. API lifecycle focus of the product: Every feature, product decision, and UI/UX element was designed to cover the needs of all the stakeholders across the entire API lifecycle. For CTOs, Project Managers, QA Testers and Data Analysts, the analytics, dashboards, and simple drill down ability lets them quickly understand everything there is to know about all the APIs currently being used, and where there might be potential issues currently and soon. For the technical teams and developers all aspects of Treblle are there to help them perform their job better while reducing related admin and manual work. Treblle improves the time to market of new product and feature launches, while minimising time to resolve any issues if and when they might arise, leading to a healthier, more stable release cycle and smoother API lifecycle process.
3. Highly sticky product: By planning on being the go-to SW for absolutely everything related to your APIs within an organisation, Treblle is being used by entire project teams daily as it covers the entire API lifecycle. And as the majority of APIs interact with outside organisations and users and are often built in collaboration with other companies, the usage of Treblle easily spreads from organisation to organisation and has the opportunity to embed itself deeply into all API and app development teams.
4. Massive market opportunity:As mentioned earlier, with over 80% of the web traffic being driven by APIs, APIs are here to stay. Yet we all need an easier way to work with and understand how our APIs are performing, by allowing API developers to monitor the performance of their APIs in real-time, and debug issues the moment they arise (or even before they arise by finding leading indicators to issues) Treblle is here to stay.
5. Strong early traction speaks for itself: Treblle has gone from monitoring 200k API requests at time of investment 6 months ago to over 8M APIcalls monthly at the time of its launch, has auto-generated API documentation for 7k endpoints, and auto-generated over 15k sets of API documentation across 500 projects. The product has recently launched on Product Hunt alongside the new website (visit https://www.producthunt.com/posts/treblle and https://www.treblle.com for more).

Thinking one step further, by understanding how your APIs are functioning, you also understand how each system is interacting and working with each other in real-time. As each system comes online as a node in your network of solutions, Treblle has the ability to understand best practices as well as identify issues and risks not just for entire organisations, but entire networks of organisations (this extends all the way across web3 as well). This can be from what combination of SW play and perform best together, to which combinations lead to potential risks and paths of attack.

Being able to understand and build on this will be vital for organisations of the future.

Obviously, we are just at the beginning of a long journey, but we’re very bullish on what the future has in store for Treblle and APIs in general!

With that it’s probably time to PUT this article on APIs and Treblle to REST, and finally POST this article (my editor is also telling me to GET a life as these jokes are not as funny as I think they are) 😉

Team Treblle, welcome to the Nauta Family, we are extremely excited to be part of this journey with you!

🤓 Learn more about Treblle on their website: https://www.treblle.com

📚 Read more on APIs via the excellent post by Vedran on Hacker Noon: https://hackernoon.com/the-rest-of-the-10-commandments

👩‍💻 Hiring now: Work on the future of APIs and observability with a great & experienced team. If you are an experienced backend or full-stack developer with experience with Laravel the team would love to meet you!!

Say goodbye to manual documentation tasks!