Just a few weeks ago, 18-year-old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot graduated from high school.
While most teenagers their age shall be having fun with their last summer before college or the adult jobs that await them, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are sitting in a VC office in Boulder, Colorado.
They are spending the summer working on their startup APIGen after raising $500,000 in pre-seed investment from Varana Capital. Fitzgerald will go to Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot will move near the university, but is putting her college plans on hold to turn into a full-time startup founder.
The money was raised while they were still in high school, after a prototype of their idea generated a lot of interest among Boulder’s large community of AI enthusiasts.
APIGen is working on a platform that can build custom APIs based on natural language prompts. For example, it’s going to give you the chance to permit an e-commerce company to easily request an API connecting its web interface to its database and the platform will provide it.
By API, developers don’t just mean a standard “application programming interface” that enables applications to exchange data or perform other easy workflow functions. They want APIGen to build complex, custom APIs that may perform multiple or serial tasks.
“We actually generate code for the APIs, so you can have business logic and actual custom functionality within those APIs as well,” Van Landschoot told TechCrunch.
Fitzgerald says that in addition to web applications and databases, one of his startup’s goal areas is IoT devices. He gives the example of a customer requesting an API that instructs a drone to fly around the perimeter of an area, capture images, and allow one other application to interact with the results. Another example is an API that uses facial recognition to build security. Once a database of photos of verified worker faces is created, a user can request an API from APIGen that can allow the camera on the smartlock door to ascertain the faces of all individuals who appear in this database before unlocking the door.
“At the end of the day, APIs can be as simple or as complex as you make them,” Fitzgerald said. “They can range from new connectors that pull one data entry, one row of data from a database table, to the entire backend. And that’s what we’re trying to focus on, for whole web applications and for whole IoT applications.”
The teenagers met on their school’s debate team and bonded over their love of coding. Their first project together was a chatbot that allowed people to speak with data. They quickly realized that this was not an original idea. Still, while building this app, they learned that their technology relies on APIs and that “creating APIs was quite tedious,” Fitzgerald said. “They were difficult to design.”
That’s why they focused on it. Once they’d created an alpha version of their idea, a demo-level tool, they began showing it to developers in their circle to get feedback. They knew people in the local tech industry. Van Landschoot’s dad works in cybersecurity IT, and Fitzgerald landed a summer internship as a programmer at SoftBank through connections with a friend’s dad.
And then they began cold messaging the VCs on LinkedIn and anyone else they thought might respond.
“We asked people to destroy this field,” Fitzgerald said.
The VC is so impressed that he offers an investment
One of the individuals who got the message – and had heard about the founders through other contacts in the tight-knit Denver/Boulder startup community – was Philip Broenniman, founding father of Varana Capital in Denver. Varana began as the family office of Broenniman and a “very wealthy” friend, and inside 13 years it had grown into a firm with institutional LP money and $400 million in AUM, he told TechCrunch
Broenniman and Varana’s chief operating officer, Ankur Ahuja, agreed to satisfy with the teenagers. “We came to the meeting thinking we would give fatherly, kind advice; say some words of wisdom,” Broenniman told TechCrunch. “We left after two hours of their presentation thinking it was the best presentation we had heard in the last five years. We were amazed by the compelling insights of these two 18-year-olds.”
Fitzgerald, dressed in his best sweater and Van Landschoot in a debate team-style collared shirt, took the debate training course and introduced their company, vision, potential market and themselves.
Instead of giving feedback on the pitch: “At the end of the meeting they said they were really interested,” Fitzgerald said of the Varana partners. Broenniman asked the teens how much money they were looking for.
Varana fastidiously examined the potential of the API market, which resulted in multi-billion successes (including MuleSoft bought by Salesforce, Apigee bought by Google). The founders’ backgrounds are also included: Fitzgerald graduated as valedictorian from a top-ranked high school in Boulder, which has a highly rated public education system; Van Landschoot was such a talented programmer that he tutored computer science students from the age of 14.
The Varana partners scheduled a second meeting for founders to reveal their technology and make sure the teens weren’t only “good at talking, but not delivering and doing things,” as Van Landschoot described.
The teenagers admitted they were nervous, but the demo went well and the VC offered a term sheet: $250,000 in pre-seed money and one other $250,000 in SAFE, a note that converts to equity if the startup later raises funds. VC also provided office space.
While presenting to VC, Fitzgerald learned about Boulder’s lively 1,400-member AI meetup, organized by the dad of one of Fitzgerald’s tennis teammates. Boulder has a famously close and cozy startup community and, along with nearby Denver, is home to office outposts from Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and many others.
The teenagers joined the group and demonstrated their product, and local AI enthusiasts supported them and their idea.
APIGen is obviously very early. And he isn’t the only one working on API automation. Giant tech corporations like Salesforce’s MuleSoft and established startups like RapidAPI are already operating in this market, as are most of the cloud giants.
APIGen also doesn’t have a minimum viable product built yet, although it’s getting closer beta version which shall be released this month. “We have already seen some interest from companies, but obviously at this stage we are still in the pre-nomination phase for the MVP award and we are just working to announce the award as soon as possible,” Fitzgerald said.
Still, Broenniman, who holds investment-related seats on the board, has an advantage ahead of him. He points out that the young founders have already built a community of willing supporters.
“APIGen may be a tool we invest in, but we are forming a partnership with Christopher and Nicholas,” he said. “It’s a market value over $7 billion. They enter there with some elements of competition, but they manage their very own space. From our perspective, the probability of a comeback is crazy.