StepZen burst onto the scene at the end of last year with a $8 million seed investment and a goal for API unification.
Today, the business unveiled two new free GraphQL tools to assist simplify API administration, bringing that ambition into sharper perspective.
Anant Jhingran, CEO and co-founder of StepZen, views the graph as part of "a fundamental revolution that's going place in how apps connect with the back end."
As more APIs are used to construct software and link systems, StepZen wants the graph to be at the heart of API management, handling all of the many relationships and dependencies between these APIs.
Crossing numerous apps to get all of the information about anything with linkages is inherently complicated.
For example, a corporation may desire to consolidate all of its client information, yet it is spread across various platforms.
What are your thoughts on the relationships between client information, interaction data, and prior orders?
One is from the CRM, one is from marketing and customer support tools, and one is from an order management system.
StepZen's goal is to make the process of connecting the dots easier.
"The key point is that, while there are various sub-elements," Jhingran noted, "the use cases actually link the dots because that's where the true strength of the business [lies]."
Today, the firm is offering two free tools to assist with this.
The first is GraphQL Studio, which assists businesses in creating a map or flow that depicts the links between the many APIs your firm employs, whether internal private APIs or public SaaS APIs.
"As a result, developers are not limited to working with proprietary APIs."
It is not true that developers solely work with SaaS APIs.
"And what we want to do is enable both sides of the narrative, and our GraphQL Studio is basically beginning from 'here are your pre-finished APIs' that you're going to sort of pick and choose and then add your own special sauce," he explained.
The second component is GraphQL Federation, a tool that can aggregate the multiple graphs inside an organisation into a unified graph of graphs, allowing businesses to understand how the various components work together.
The ability to federate these little graphs has been a significant difficulty that StepZen hopes to address with this technology.
"Fundamentally, the concept is that there is no one graph in a team of teams, so when you look at how apps consume data, they have to link across different graphs and get to a unified graph."
"And that is what the GraphQL Federation does," he explained.
He claims that the firm is providing both tools for free to developers as a starting point for connecting multiple APIs, and that as they progress into more sophisticated use cases, they may sign up for StepZen.
"Once people start using the tools, some will say, 'we need to kind of change it a bit, or we need to add our own private data,' and that's where we want people to join up for StepZen, but we also want people to succeed without signing up."
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