Software startup Stoplight secures $3.25 million in seed funding to accelerate the evolution of enterprise API lifecycle management

• Raises $3.5 seed funding round led by Bill Wood Ventures; NextGen Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, Social Starts, and Capital Factory also join as investors

• Seed round brings total funding to date to $4.65M

• Enterprise API platform plans to further invest in technology, double engineering team and expand integration ecosystem

• Stoplight has secured 500+ paying customers to date

Stoplight, the enterprise API lifecycle platform that helps developers build, test, and improve their web APIs, has raised $3.25 million in seed round to double its engineering team and become the leading enterprise solution for API lifecycle management and governance. The latest round was led by Bill Wood Ventures, with additional investment from NextGen Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, Social Starts, and Capital Factory. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $4.65 million. Stoplight plans to use the funding

Founded in 2014 Marc MacLeod, the Austin, Texas-based Stoplight has built an enterprise-grade modular enterprise API tool kit that empowers more efficient workflows. Stoplight has secured $4.65 million in funding to date from investors including Bill Wood Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, Social Starts, and Capital Factory.

“Stoplight’s mission is to streamline the API lifecycle, multiplying the productivity of every API stakeholder,” said Stoplight CEO Marc MacLeod. “We have the most respected value-add investors in Austin driving the change, and the wealth of experience they bring will help make Stoplight a category-leading company.”

In an immediate step toward its goal of adding talent to its engineering team, Stoplight today also announced the hiring of Brian Rock as Director of Engineering. Rock most recently served as Director of Engineering and Automation Product at Austin-based Applause.

With over 500 paying customers, including large enterprises, Stoplight is already seeing significant traction, particularly in the finance and healthcare sectors. Macro trends such as containerization, microservices, IoT, and serverless are driving a paradigm shift from large and centralized to small and distributed. Stoplight is bringing efficiencies and automation to a workflow that has over the last decade become overly complex and inefficient.

Stoplight’s seed investors are a who’s who of the Austin venture capital community. Bill Wood, co-founder of Austin Ventures and founder of Silverton Partners, has lead the start-up financing for dozens of successful Austin companies, including Silicon Labs and SailPoint, both of which are multi-billion dollar public companies today. NextGen Venture Partners is the nation’s first network-driven venture firm, Next Coast Ventures’ sole mission is to work with the best entrepreneurs on the next coast of innovation, Social Starts funded Mashable, and Capital Factory is the linchpin of the Austin early-stage startup community.

“Software is evolving from a state in which it is developed line by line into a monolithic application to one in which it is assembled from small units or microservices,” said Bill Wood. “This approach has enormous advantages but it does create significant complexity in terms of how these smaller units are assembled and how they relate to each other. Stoplight robustly manages these connections, or APIs, such that developers are freed up to exploit all the advantages of microservices without dealing with the downside.”

“Stoplight, with its enterprise prowess, community-driven thinking and all around innovation, is where enterprise API development is headed. With the proliferation of microservices, new tools are needed to manage API workflows and Stoplight is the leader in this field,” said Jon Bassett, Managing Partner at NextGen Ventures.

“At Next Coast, we are sharply focused on how emerging platforms can revolutionize the way enterprises operate, and Stoplight’s incredible product is changing the game for the API lifecycle, making it more efficient, accurate and easier to access across an enterprise,” said Michael Smerklo, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures. “Marc and the team’s deep domain expertise give us great confidence that they will be the team and the product to disrupt the massive API economy, and we are so glad to be part of their journey alongside a great syndicate of investment partners.”