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 would be living it up in their last summer before college or adult jobs await, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are in a VC office in Boulder, Colorado.
They are spending the summer working on their startup APIGen after raising a $500,000 pre-seed investment from Varana Capital. Fitzgerald will attend Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot will move near the university, but is putting his college plans on hold to be a full-time startup founder.
The money was raised while they were still in high school after a prototype for their idea garnered a lot of interest among Boulder’s large community of AI enthusiasts.
APIGen is working on a platform that will generate custom APIs from natural language prompts. It will be able to, for example, allow an e-commerce business to simply request an API that connects the web interface to its database and the platform will deliver.
By API, the founders don’t just mean a standard “application programming interface” that allows applications to exchange data or perform some other simple workflow function. They want APIGen to build complex custom APIs that can do multiple or serialized tasks.
“We’re actually building the code for the APIs so you can have business logic, real custom functionality inside those APIs as well,” Van Landschoot told TechCrunch.
In addition to web applications and databases, Fitzgerald says IoT devices are one of his startup’s target areas. He offers the example of a client requesting an API that instructs a drone to fly around the perimeter of an area, capture images, and allow another application to interface with the result. Another example is an API that uses facial recognition for building security. Once a database of photos of verified employee faces is created, the user could ask APIGen for an API that allows a smartlock’s door camera to check the face of anyone arriving in that database before unlocking the door.
“APIs at the end of the day can be as simple or as complex as you make them,” Fitzgerald said. “They can range from new connectors that receive a data entry, a row of data from a table in a database, to entire back ends. And that’s really what we’re trying to target there, for whole web applications for whole IoT applications.”
The teenagers met in their school’s discussion group and bonded over their love of coding. Their first project together was a chatbot that would allow people to chat with data. They soon realized that it was not an original idea. But while building that app, they learned that their technology relied on APIs, and “creating APIs was kind of a pain,” Fitzgerald said. “They were difficult to design.”
So they focused on that. Once they built an alpha version of their idea, a demo-level tool, they started showing it to their circle of developers to get feedback. They knew people in their local tech industry. Van Landschoot’s dad works in cybersecurity IT, and Fitzgerald landed a summer software internship at SoftBank through a relationship with a friend’s dad.
And then they started cold-messaging VCs on LinkedIn and anyone else they thought might respond.
“We asked people to destroy this field,” Fitzgerald said.
A VC is so impressed, he offers to invest
One of the people who got the message—and had heard about the founders through other connections in the tight-knit Denver/Boulder startup community—was Philip Broenniman, founder of Denver’s Varana Capital. Varana started as a family office for Broenniman and a “very rich” friend, and in the 13 years since, it’s grown to a firm with institutional LP money and $400 million in AUM, he told TechCrunch.
Broenniman and Varana COO Ankur Ahuja agreed to meet with the teenagers. “We went into the meeting thinking we would provide some parenting advice. give some words of wisdom,” Broenniman told TechCrunch. “We walked out after two hours of their show thinking this was the best show we’d heard in five years. We were amazed by the compelling insights provided by these two 18-year-olds.”
With Fitzgerald dressed in his best sweater and Van Landschoot in a debate team-style collared shirt, they bent over their debate practice and presented their company, their vision, their potential market and themselves.
Instead of on-field comments, “At the end of the meeting, they indicated they were really interested,” Fitzgerald said of Varana’s partners. Broenniman asked the teenagers how much money they were looking for.
Varana did her due diligence by looking at the potential of the API market, which has produced multi-billion dollar successes (MuleSoft bought by Salesforce, Apigee bought by Google, to name just two). And he looked at the background of the founders: Fitzgerald graduated as valedictorian of a top high school in Boulder, which has a highly ranked public education system. Van Landschoot was such a talented programmer that he taught computer science students from the age of 14.
Varana’s partners scheduled a second meeting for the founders to present their technology to make sure the teens weren’t just “good at talking, but delivering and doing things,” as Van Landschoot described it.
The teenagers were nervous, they admitted, but the demo went well and the VC offered a term sheet: $250,000 in pre-launch money with another $250,000 in a SAFE, which is a note that converts to equity if the startup increase later. VC also provided office space.
While on their way to VC, Fitzgerald learned about Boulder’s active 1,400-member AI Meetup, which was organized by a father of one of Fitzgerald’s tennis teammates. Boulder has a famously close-knit and cozy startup community and, along with nearby Denver, is home to office outposts for Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and many others.
The teenagers joined the team and pitched their product, and local AI enthusiasts rallied behind them and their idea.
APIGen is obviously too early. And it’s not the only one working on automating APIs. Tech giants like Salesforce’s MuleSoft and established startups like RapidAPI are already working in this market, as are most of the cloud giants.
APIGen also has yet to build its minimum viable product, although it is getting closer a beta version which will be released this month. “We’ve already had some business interest, but obviously we’re still pre-MVP at this stage, and we’re just rolling, trying to get it out there as quickly as possible,” Fitzgerald said.
Still, Broenniman, who takes board seats with investments, is in the game. He points out how the new founders have already built a community of eager supporters.
“APIGen may be the vehicle we’re making an investment in, but we’re building a partnership with Christopher and Nicholas,” he said. “This is an over $7 billion market. They come in with some elements of competition there but carve out their own space. The opportunity to come back from our point of view is crazy.”
