Apiary, the API design platform company, today announced it has secured $1.63 million in seed funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures. In addition, Apiary has joined Heavybit, the leading community for developer-focused businesses that is led by Heroku founder James Lindenbaum.

The funding will be used to further Apiary's leadership in API design and expand the company's engineering division to keep up with rising customer demand. As one of the first companies in the world focused on API design, Apiary is committed to investing in innovation around its core platform and growing Apiary's API tooling strategy that includes API Blueprint, the popular open-source format for describing APIs.

'The stunning growth of the API market has firmly moved APIs from being a purely specialist domain, to large, mainstream usage. That is fueling a substantial market for a far better class of technologies and tools to design, build and manage them,' said Jakub Nesetril, CEO and founder of Apiary.

By 2016, 50% of all B2B collaboration will take place through Web APIs, according to Gartner Research, and their expectation is that by 2014, 75% of the Fortune 1000 will offer public Web APIs.(1)

Apiary helps developers build beautiful APIs, quickly. Developers and businesses use Apiary's API Blueprint language as the fastest way to describe APIs -- from prototypes through collaborative design and review processes before costly and time-consuming programming begins. Developers then use Apiary to check their programming correctly follows the specification, to share their APIs with others and help them use those APIs quickly.

'What excited us about Apiary is their unique platform approach to the big and growing problem of how to create, document and test APIs,' said David Aronoff, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners. 'The traction the company has achieved prior to funding has been amazing, growing from 2,000 APIs to more than 17,000 with a world-class list of organizations using the platform. We are thrilled to work with Apiary as they bring a much needed solution to address a massive market opportunity.'

'APIs are fundamentally changing the way software is created, making the need for technology to build and maintain APIs critical. Apiary is one of the few firms who understand the unique challenges of good API design and the Apiary platform is the easiest way for developers to manage the entire API lifecycle,' said James Lindenbaum, founder of Heavybit.

More information about Apiary can be found at Apiary.io.

About Apiary

Apiary Inc. is a Heavybit company, headquartered in San Francisco with engineering operations in Prague, Czech Republic. It was founded by Jakub Nesetril and Jan Moravec, and opened a public beta of its innovative API design platform at end of 2012. To date Apiary has gathered over 25,000 APIs, making it the largest collection of APIs worldwide. For more information visit apiary.io or follow on Twitter at @apiaryio.

About Flybridge Capital Partners

Flybridge Capital Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm whose mission is to assist entrepreneurs in growing innovative, global companies. With $560 million under management, the firm is focused on seed and early-stage investing in technology markets and is led by a team with domain expertise and more than half a century of combined experience in venture capital. The firm has invested in over 60 companies including 10gen (the MongoDB Company), Brontes Technologies (acquired by 3M), Cartera Commerce, Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter) DataXu, Digital Lumens, Open English, Reveal Imaging (acquired by SAIC) and ZING (acquired by Dell). For more information, visit www.flybridge.com or follow us on Twitter @flybridgecap.

About Baseline Ventures

Baseline addresses the gap between individual investors and institutional venture capitalists. Since its inception, Baseline has invested in more than 75 companies and helped more than 25 companies exit profitably for founders and investors alike. Baseline is proud to be a seed investor associated with the following highly promising companies: Instagram and Parakey (both acquired by Facebook), Heroku, ExactTarget, GoInstant and CoTweet (all acquired by Salesforce.com) and Crashlytics and GeoAPI (both acquired by Twitter). For more information, please visit baselinev.com.