Mashery API management platform has continued to grow steadily. After growing from 35,000 developers in its network to 100,000 in a year, the company now has over 185,000 developers on its network — that’s a roughly 15% jump from the 160,000 developers the company touted back in July.
But that doesn’t mean CEO Oren Michels is ready to rest on his laurels. In a TCTV interview with TechCrunch, Michels explained that the growth in wearable computing devices (whether it be quantified self or HUD headsets) will provide new challenges and opportunities for the company.
“These devices are compact and connected in ways where they’re bandwidth constrained and processor constrained,” said Michels. “We want to send them exactly the data they need, in the format they need it, and only what they need.”
Although this poses challenges for most API makers, Michels claims that Mashery is poised for this transition with its API Packager tool, which lets someone like a product manager (not a developer) “slice and dice” information down to what’s necessary on various platforms.
But what about competition from Layer7 and Apigee? After all, the API marketplace is far more integral to modern-day business than most people give credit for.
According to Michels, Mashery dominates its market. When asked about Apigee’s API Management products, specifically the deeper analytics platform, the CEO said that “Apigee is a great company, and when the market sees a Coke, they want there to be a Pepsi.”
“So they tend to put us in the same realm,” he admitted. Apigee is a mobile-focused API management platform that recently raised a huge round just a day after Mashery announced a $10 million Series D. The company has put a lot of focus on delivering better data analysis to its customers from its APIs.
Still, Michels said that Mashery’s developer network is 10x the size of the next competitor’s, and that he sees Apigee and Mashery as coming from two very different places.
“They started as a hardware router and software router company and have added some API management stuff,” he said. “We started as a multi-tenant SaaS platform for APIs and have been doing that for the last seven years.”
With over 185,000 developers currently, and over 50,000 apps using Mashery APIs as of July, Mashery continues to try and increase outreach with developers. The company often provides data back to developers, like when they should implement ecommerce applications during times of increased purchasing activity. Mashery also held over 80 hackathons last year to promote use of its APIs.
“Developers seem pretty happy with what we provide,” said the CEO.