StopLight lands $6M Series A to make API development process easier for developers and organizations

StopLight, an Austin, Texas-based online platform that helps organizations manage their entire the pre-production API workflow, has closed $6 million Series A round of funding to augment engineering efforts, accelerating its product roadmap and covering more customer use cases. The round, which was co-led by Next Coast Ventures and Bill Wood Ventures, brings total funding to date to $10M.

Founded in 2014 by Marc MacLeod, Stoplight’s API Design Management software platform provides a suite of products that cover the entire pre-production API life cycle. Stoplight’s customers include companies in the Fortune 1000. Stoplight’s products provide a means for design-first microservice application development. Developing good design-first practices will minimize future costs, speed up your time to market and lead to more consistent, higher quality microservice and IoT applications.

A Gartner Cool Vendor in Application Development and Platforms, Stoplight helps organize and manage the more than 22,000 APIs. As a lack of standards and governance continues to threaten the resilience of enterprise APIs, Stoplight’s complete lifecycle platform enables best practices, efficiencies and consistencies that were previously lacking.

“With IoT and AI poised to rise to new heights of integration in the coming decade, enterprises finally have the opportunity to unburden their microservices architecture,” said Stoplight CEO Marc Macleod. “Next Coast Ventures and Bill Wood Ventures have deep experience building lasting B2B companies, and we couldn’t ask for better partners to grow Stoplight to the next phase of success.”

Launched in the fall of 2019, Stoplight Studio quickly became the category’s best-in-class API designer. The company saw over 200% YoY growth in 2019, hired 15 new employees and launched two new products.

“Stoplight created the category of API design management, and their incredible traction validates what the market needs,” said Mike Smerklo, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures. “API-first design is becoming a fundamental component of enterprise engineering, and we have full confidence that Stoplight will only deepen their category leadership in the next several years.”

“The online world is evolving into a network of connected sensors and smart devices,” said Bill Wood, general partner at Bill Wood Ventures. “Without adequate API design management, the next evolution will never reach its full potential. Stoplight is an integral part of enabling developers to design our new online world.”