Just a few weeks ago, 18-year-old friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landshut graduated from high school.
While most teens their age would be living that last summer before college or the adult jobs that awaited them, Fitzgerald and Van Landshut are holed up in a venture capital office in Boulder, Colorado.
They are spending the summer working on their APIGen after raising a $500,000 seed investment from Varana Capital. Fitzgerald will head to Penn State in the fall, and Van Landshut will move closer to the university, but will postpone his college plans to become a startup founder full-time.
The money was raised while they were still in high school after a prototype of their idea received significant attention among Boulder’s large community of AI enthusiasts.
APIGen works on a platform that will create custom APIs from natural language prompts. It will be able, for example, to allow an e-commerce business to simply request an application programming interface (API) that connects the web front-end to its database, and the platform will deliver it.
By API, the founders don’t just mean a standard “application programming interface” that allows applications to exchange data or perform some other simple workflow function. They want APIGen to create complex, custom APIs that can perform multiple or serial tasks.
“We actually create the code for the APIs so that you can have the business logic and actual custom functionality within those APIs as well,” Van Landshut told TechCrunch.
In addition to web applications and databases, Fitzgerald says IoT devices are one of the areas his startup is targeting. He gives an example of a customer requesting an application programming interface (API) that directs a drone to fly around the perimeter of an area, taking images and allowing another application to interact with the result. Another example is an application programming interface (API) that uses facial recognition to build security. Once a database of verified employee face images is created, the user can ask APIGen for an API that allows the smart lock’s door camera to check the face of everyone who arrives against this database before opening the door.
“APIs, ultimately, can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be,” Fitzgerald said. “It can range from just new connectors that take one data entry, or one row of data from a database table, to entire back ends. And that’s really what we’re trying to target there, for entire web applications and entire IoT applications.”
The teens met on their school’s debate team and developed a strong bond over their love of programming. Their first project together was a chatbot that allowed people to chat using data. They quickly realized that it was not an original idea. However, while creating this app, they learned that their technology relied on APIs and that “creating APIs was kind of a pain,” Fitzgerald said. “It was difficult to design.”
So they focused on that. Once they had formulated an initial version of their idea, a beta-level tool, they began showing it to programmers in their circle to get feedback. They knew people in their local technology industry. Van Landschoot’s father works in cybersecurity IT, and Fitzgerald got a summer internship as a programmer at SoftBank by connecting with a friend’s father.
They then started cold-lettering venture capitalists on LinkedIn and anyone else they thought might respond.
“We asked people to destroy this playground,” Fitzgerald said.
The VC was very impressed and offered to invest
One of the people who received the message — and heard about the founders through other connections in Denver/Boulder’s tight-knit startup community — was Philip Broenemann, founder of Varana Capital in Denver. Varana started out as the family office of Broenemann and a “super-rich” friend, and in the 13 years since then, the firm has expanded into a firm with institutional LP money and $400 million in assets under management, he told TechCrunch.
Broenniman and Varana COO Ankur Ahuja agreed to interview the teens. “We went into the meeting thinking we would offer some pastoral parenting advice; “He offered some words of wisdom,” Broenemann told TechCrunch. “We came away after two hours of the presentation thinking this was the best presentation we had heard in the last five years. We were blown away by the compelling ideas presented by these two 18-year-olds.
With Fitzgerald wearing his best jacket, and Van Landshut wearing a debate team-style collared shirt, they went into their debate practice and pitched their company, their vision, the potential market, and themselves.
Rather than offering comments on the pitch, Fitzgerald said of Varana’s partners: “At the end of the meeting, they stated they were actually interested.” Broenemann asked the teens how much money they were looking for.
Varana has done its best to look into the potential of the API market, which has been a multi-billion dollar success (MuleSoft bought by Salesforce, Apigee bought by Google, to name a few). It looked into the founders’ backgrounds: Fitzgerald graduated valedictorian from a top high school in Boulder, which has a top-ranking public education system; Van Landshut was such a gifted programmer that he had been tutoring computer science students in college since he was 14 years old.
Varana’s partners scheduled a second founders’ meeting to showcase their techniques to ensure that teens were not only “good at talking, but good at presenting and doing things,” as Van Landshut described.
They admitted the teens were nervous, but the demo went well and the venture capitalist offered a term sheet: $250,000 in pre-seed money with another $250,000 in a safe, a note that converts to stock if the startup raises money. Later. The VC also provides office space.
While they were pitching venture capital funds, Fitzgerald learned about Boulder’s 1,400-member Active AI meetup, organized by the father of one of Fitzgerald’s tennis teammates. Boulder has a convenient, nearby startup community and, along with nearby Denver, hosts office locations for Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and many more.
Teenagers joined the group and demonstrated their product, and local AI enthusiasts rallied behind them and their idea.
Obviously APIGen is very early. And they’re not the only ones working on automating APIs. Tech giants like Salesforce’s MuleSoft and established startups like RapidAPI are already operating in this market, as are most cloud giants.
APIGen also has not yet built a minimum viable product, although it is getting close to it experimental copy Which will be released this month. “We’ve already had some interest from companies, but obviously we’re still in the pre-MVP stage at this point, and we’re just trying to get it in as soon as possible,” Fitzgerald said.
However, Broenemann, who holds board seats thanks to the investments, is along for the ride. He points out how young founders have already built a community of passionate supporters.
“APIGen may be the vehicle we invest in, but we are partnering with Christopher and Nicholas,” he said. “This is a $7 billion-plus market. They’re coming in with some elements of competition there, but they’re carving out a space for themselves. The opportunity to come back from our perspective is crazy.”