api
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Danny Sheridan and the company on the apartment wall
Before Fern joined Postman, Danny Sheridan tracked its customers on sticky notes. His path from a bedroom e-commerce business to API tooling follows a persistent interest: making useful work easier to repeat.
Erik Kiser and the art of doing the work once
He built a consulting business around the awkward business of connecting companies. Then the Orderful founder began building software to make that work disappear.
Akshay Dodeja Is Making the Shipping Container Legible
A failed trucking prototype gave Akshay Dodeja a better problem: the scattered, stubborn data behind global trade. Terminal49 is his long campaign to turn that mess into software people can act on.
Trevor Gary
Trevor Gary is the founder and CEO of Micruity, a retirement-income infrastructure company that connects 401(k) recordkeepers, asset managers and insurers so plans can offer annuities and pension-style lifetime income. A former pension actuary at Deloitte Canada, Gary saw firsthand how the shift from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans left millions of Americans without guaranteed income in retirement. He founded Micruity in 2017-2018 to build the data conduit that makes lifetime-income products work at scale. The company has raised roughly $27 million from a roster of insurance and financial heavyweights including Prudential, TIAA, State Street, Nationwide, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Pacific Life.
Ximena Aleman
Ximena Aleman is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Prometeo, the largest open banking API platform in Latin America. A former journalist from Uruguay, she pivoted from covering entrepreneurs to becoming one, building infrastructure that connects over 1,200 financial institutions across 11 countries through a single API. Under her leadership Prometeo has won the trust of banks like JP Morgan, Santander, Citi and BBVA and raised backing from PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next and others. She is a vocal advocate for financial inclusion and for founders from overlooked corners of the region.
Prajit Nanu
Prajit Nanu is the co-founder and CEO of Nium, the Singapore-born fintech unicorn that has quietly become the plumbing behind global money movement for banks, airlines, and digital platforms. Starting with a frustrating attempt to wire INR 40,000 for a friend's bachelor party in Phuket, he built what is now a $1.4 billion payments infrastructure company processing over $8 billion annually across 190+ countries in 100 currencies. A commerce graduate from Mumbai with a sales background rather than a fintech pedigree, Nanu turned that outsider status into competitive advantage - building what incumbents told him was impossible.
Rishi Sharma
Rishi Sharma runs Briza, a Toronto-based commercial insurance API platform that connects carriers, MGAs, brokers and software companies through a single interface. He joined in 2018 as CTO/head of product after a stint leading engineering on the FreshBooks redesign, and stepped up to CEO in December 2022 after co-founder Ben Munro departed. His work focuses on API reliability, quote-and-bind automation, and making legacy commercial lines behave like modern developer infrastructure.
Sam Seely
Sam Seely is the co-founder and CEO of Knock, a New York-based notification infrastructure company that turned the tedious plumbing of transactional email, push, SMS and in-app messages into an API and workflow engine used by Vercel, Amplitude and others. He and CTO Chris Bell, who met at Frame.io, launched Knock in 2021 and raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures in February 2024, bringing total funding to $18M.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Zack Isaacs
Zack Isaacs is the co-founder and CEO of Movemint, a mobile-first platform rebuilding how athletic events are discovered, registered, run, and remembered. Strava's first API hire, he spent five years wiring the fitness world together - linking Garmin, Wahoo, Peloton, and Zwift - and led engineering for Strava's paid Routes, one of its most lucrative features. In 2023 he left to fix the part of endurance sport that still felt broken: the sign-up. Backed by Underscore VC and Strava co-founder Michael Horvath, Movemint launched in February 2024 and has roughly tripled its business every quarter since.
Bankole Omodunbi
Bankole Omodunbi is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Verbwire, a Web3 infrastructure startup that turns weeks of Solidity, Hardhat and wallet configuration into a single REST API call. A former Managing Director in equities quant trading at Credit Suisse with 16+ years on Wall Street, he left banking in 2021 to build developer tooling that lets engineers deploy smart contracts, mint NFTs, move assets cross-chain and spin up wallets using familiar languages like Python and Java. Verbwire raised a $12.3M Series A and is based in the New York area.
Sahil Hasan
Sahil Hasan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dots, a developer-friendly global payouts platform that has processed over $1 billion to more than 1 million gig workers, creators, and contractors in 190+ countries. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a CMU master's degree, Sahil spent time as a Research Engineer at Google X before co-founding Dots through Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company raised an $8.9M Series A in February 2026 led by DCM Ventures, is profitable, and growing revenue 400% year-over-year.
Thomas Schiavone
Thomas Schiavone is a San Francisco startup operator who has spent his career on the bottoms-up, developer-first side of software. He was the first product manager at Twilio (around employee #15), went on to be COO at EasyPost and VP of Product at Sift, advised at Netlify, then founded and ran the SaaS CRM startup Calixa. He now leads Courier, the developer-first notifications platform that lets engineering teams design and deliver email, SMS, push, and chat through one API.
Bo Jiang
Bo Jiang is the co-founder and CEO of Lithic, the New York card-issuing platform that started life as the consumer privacy tool Privacy.com. He and two childhood friends built the burn-after-use virtual card people loved, then discovered the real prize was the issuer-processor plumbing underneath it. When developers started reverse-engineering Privacy.com's API to issue their own cards, Jiang turned the back end into the product, rebranded to Lithic, and now sells programmable money movement to high-growth companies.
Rory O'Reilly
Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Abhijit Kane
Abhijit Kane is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by 20+ million developers and 98% of Fortune 500 companies. A BITS Pilani alumnus, he joined Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti in 2014 to turn a viral Stack Overflow side project into a $5.6 billion company that defines how developers build, test, and collaborate on APIs.
Abhinav Asthana
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Augusto Marietti
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Harry Zhang
Harry Zhang is the Co-Founder of Lob, the direct mail automation platform he built from scratch with Leore Avidar after Y Combinator's Summer 2013 batch. Inspired by his own frustrations managing clunky direct mail campaigns at Microsoft, Zhang coded Lob's first APIs himself and grew the company to over $100 million in annual revenue, $79.5M in total funding, and 12,000+ business customers. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (Enterprise Technology), he holds degrees in Informatics and Business from University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and remains on Lob's board of directors.
Jon Dahl
Jon Dahl is the co-founder and CEO of Mux, a developer-first video infrastructure platform that powers video at scale for companies like Robinhood, PBS, and ViacomCBS. A serial founder who sold Zencoder to Brightcove for $30M in 2012 and co-created Video.js — the most widely deployed open-source video player on the web — Dahl has spent two decades turning the complexity of online video into simple, powerful APIs for developers. Mux has raised $173.9M in total funding, achieved unicorn status in 2021, and processes several billion monthly video streams.
Jonathan Perichon
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Jordan Dearsley
Jordan Dearsley is the co-founder and CEO of Vapi, the leading voice AI infrastructure platform trusted by over one million developers and powering more than one billion calls. A University of Waterloo software engineering dropout turned Y Combinator alumnus, Dearsley built Vapi out of a personal AI therapist he created for his morning walks in 2023. Under his leadership, Vapi reached a $500 million valuation in May 2026 after raising a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with customers including Amazon Ring, Intuit, and New York Life.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is co-founder and CEO of Daily.co, a developer platform providing real-time voice, video, and AI infrastructure. He is also the creator of Pipecat, the most widely used open-source framework for building voice AI agents. A Harvard and MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwindla has spent his career at the intersection of real-time communication and developer infrastructure—from scaling AllAfrica.com as CTO to building spatial computing interfaces at Oblong Industries to raising $62M+ for Daily and releasing Pipecat to the open-source community.
Kyle Mack
Kyle Mack is the CEO and Co-founder of Middesk, the business identity platform that's modernizing how financial institutions and fintechs verify and trust the companies they work with. Founded in 2018 after Mack witnessed firsthand the painful manual process of customer credentialing at Checkr, Middesk has grown into a category-defining KYB infrastructure company backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi Ventures with $77M+ in total funding. The company serves hundreds of enterprise clients - including two of the top three U.S. banks and fintechs like Plaid, Affirm, Brex, and Shopify - by connecting to roughly 400 U.S. government agencies to surface real-time business identity intelligence. Mack is also a Sequoia Scout, investing in early-stage founders.
Mahmoud Abdelkader
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Mwalimu Karisa
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.
Nelson Lee
Nelson Lee is the Founder and CEO of InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies), an AI-powered workflow infrastructure company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Drawing on early stints at Tencent and J.P. Morgan and participation in Stanford's Idea-to-Market program, Lee spent years mapping the fragmentation inside insurance distribution before building infrastructure to fix it. InfrasAI's headless connectivity platform decouples business logic from user interfaces, enabling insurance carriers to deploy workflows across any distributor channel without rebuilding backend systems - reducing maintenance costs by up to 60% and accelerating deployment speed by up to 70%. Backed by $21M in funding led by Foundation Capital and top insurtech investors, the company serves enterprise clients including Transamerica and Guardian across life, annuities, group benefits, disability, and wealth management.
Paulo Martins
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Richie Serna
Richie Serna is the CEO and co-founder of Finix, a full-stack payments infrastructure company he built from the ground up in San Francisco. A Harvard-educated son of Mexican immigrant parents from Santa Ana, California, Serna left management consulting at Booz & Company, taught himself to code, and joined Balanced - the first payments API for marketplaces - before founding Finix in 2015. Today, Finix has raised $205.5M in total funding (including a $75M Series C in October 2024) and has become a direct-connection payment processor competing with Stripe, Adyen, and Braintree, serving software platforms and marketplaces processing billions of dollars annually.
Shensi Ding
Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies offer hundreds of product integrations by integrating just once. A Columbia computer science graduate who detoured through investment banking at Credit Suisse and Silver Lake before becoming Chief of Staff at Expanse, she co-founded Merge in 2020 with college friend Gil Feig after they spent six months talking to 100+ companies about integration pain — without pitching a single solution. Merge has since raised $75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition, serves 7,000+ customers including Calendly, Gong, Ramp, and Brex, and has become critical infrastructure for the AI era as LLMs need real-time access to third-party data.