Just a few weeks ago, two best friends, 18-year-old Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landshoot, graduated from high school.
While most of their peers are making the most of their last summer before heading off to college or entering the adult world of work, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a venture-capital firm’s office in Boulder, Colorado.
They’re spending the summer launching their startup, APIGen, after raising $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Barana Capital. Fitzgerald will attend Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot plans to move closer to the university, but he’s put his plans for college on hold to pursue full-time startup founder status.
A prototype of their idea generated a lot of interest among Boulder’s large community of AI enthusiasts, and funding was raised while they were still in high school.
APIGen is working on a platform that builds custom APIs from natural language prompts: for example, an e-commerce business could simply request an API that connects a web frontend to a database, and the platform would provide it.
When the founders say API, they don’t just mean a standard “application programming interface” that allows applications to exchange data or perform other simple workflow functions: They want APIGen to create complex, custom APIs that can perform multiple or sequential tasks.
“We’re actually generating the code for the API, and we’re also allowing you to build business logic and actual custom functionality within the API,” Van Landschoot told TechCrunch.
Fitzgerald says that in addition to web apps and databases, IoT devices are one of his startup’s target areas. He gives the example of a customer asking for an API to have a drone fly around an area to take images and then interface the results with another application. Another example is an API that uses facial recognition for building security. Once a database of facial photos of authenticated employees is created, a user can ask APIGen for an API that would allow a smart lock’s door camera to match the face of any visitor against that database before unlocking the door.
“At the end of the day, APIs can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be,” Fitzgerald says. “They can range from a single data entry from a table in a database, a new connector that pulls one row of data, to an entire backend. What we’re really aiming for is an entire web app for an entire IoT application.”
The two met on the school debate team and bonded over their love of programming. The first project they worked on together was a chatbot that let people chat with data. They quickly realized it wasn’t an original idea. Still, in the process of developing the app, they learned their technology relied on APIs, and “APIs were kind of hard to build,” Fitzgerald says. “APIs were hard to design.”
So they focused on that. Once they had an alpha version of their idea, a demo-level tool, they started showing it to fellow programmers for feedback. They had contacts in the local tech world: Van Lanschot’s father worked in IT in cybersecurity, and Fitzgerald had landed a summer internship as a programmer at SoftBank through a friend’s father.
So they started sending cold messages to VCs on LinkedIn and anyone else who might respond.
“We asked people to destroy the presentation,” Fitzgerald said.
The VC was so impressed that they offered to invest.
One of the people who received the message was Philip Bronniman, founder of Denver’s Barana Capital, who had heard about the founder through other connections in the tight-knit Denver/Boulder startup community. Barana started as a family office for Bronniman and some “ultra-high-net-worth” friends and has since grown into a firm with institutional LP funding and $400 million in assets under management in the 13 years since, he told TechCrunch.
Bronniman and Barana COO Ankur Ahuja agreed to meet with the young people. “We went in hoping to offer some fatherly, uncle-like advice, some words of wisdom,” Bronniman told TechCrunch. “After the two-hour presentation, we left thinking it was the best presentation we’d heard in the last five years. We were blown away by the compelling insights these two 18-year-olds presented.”
With Fitzgerald in his top sweater and Van Landshort in a debate-team-style collared shirt, the two men immersed themselves in debate drills, pitching their company, their vision, their potential market, and themselves.
Rather than feedback on the presentation, “at the end of the meeting, they said they were actually interested,” Fitzgerald said of Barana’s partners. Bronniman asked the young people how much money they were looking for.
Varana closely studied the potential of the API market, which has produced billions of dollars worth of successes (Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft, Google’s acquisition of Apigee, etc.), and the backgrounds of the founders: Fitzgerald graduated at the top of his class from a top-ranked high school in Boulder, which had a highly regarded public education system, and Van Landschoate was a talented programmer who had been tutoring college computer science students since he was 14.
Varana’s partners scheduled a second meeting to demo the technology to the founders to ensure that the young people weren’t, as van Landschoot put it, “good at talking but unable to execute and act.”
Though the teens confessed they were nervous, the demo went well, and the venture capitalist offered them a term sheet: $250,000 in pre-seed funding, plus $250,000 in a safe that would convert into equity if the startup raised more money later. The venture capitalist also provided office space.
While pitching to venture capitalists, Fitzgerald learned about a thriving AI meetup in Boulder, with 1,400 members, organized by the father of a teammate on his tennis team. Boulder is known for its close-knit, intimate startup community and, along with neighboring Denver, is home to office bases for Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and more.
The young people joined the group and demonstrated their products, where local AI enthusiasts supported them and their ideas.
It’s clear that APIGen is still in its early stages, and it’s not the only company working on API automation: tech giants like Salesforce’s MuleSoft, established startups like RapidAPI, and most cloud giants are already tackling this market.
APIGen hasn’t built an MVP yet, either, but is getting close with a beta version due for release this month. “We’ve already seen interest from companies, but right now we’re still in the pre-MVP stage and we’re just working really hard to get it out there as soon as possible,” Fitzgerald said.
Still, Bronnimann, who joined the board as an investor, isn’t keen to get left behind, pointing out that young founders have already built up a community of passionate supporters.
“APIGen may be the vehicle through which we invest, but we have a partnership with Christopher and Nicholas,” he said. “It’s a $7 billion-plus market. They’re coming in there with a competitive element, but they’re carving out their own space. From our standpoint, the opportunity for return is tremendous.”
