Announcing Layer

TLDR:
• APIs power almost everything we do online but are challenging to set up
• Layer brings everything a developer needs to integrate an API or SDK into the IDE
• Our technology will enable more people to build great software faster
•  🎉We recently closed our $3M seed round 🎉

The growth of APIs has led to an explosion of novel apps and has fundamentally changed the way we create software. To build Uber in 2008, you would’ve had to build 90 percent of the app's functionality yourself: the ability to take payments, track locations on a map, validate identities, etc. This made it really hard to build great software, especially with a small team or on a limited budget.

Today, companies like Stripe, Mapbox, and Checkr have built best-in-class APIs to handle specificthings a lot of other companies need — why would I hire people to build a payment system into my ridesharing app when I know Stripe has been doing this for years?

But even APIs like Stripe are a pain to integrate. This means developers who leverage APIs are often stuck struggling or spending a ton of time trying to figure out how to get them to work. But it’s also a problem for the companies building these APIs. “Would-be customers” fail to fully integrate their products, often leading to millions in lost revenue.
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This is the problem we set out to solve at Layer. Our v1 enables companies who build APIs to create their own custom VS code extensions that connect to Github Copilot and make it easier for developers to integrate their APIs. The long term vision for Layer is twofold:‍

1.Be the central platform for developer-facing companies to manage their documentation and track the experience developers have with their products.
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2. Build a suite of technologies that convert documentation into the most accessible and useful possible formats for developers across channels.‍

We’re excited to announce our $3M seed round led by Drive Capital with participation from other top investors who wrote early checks into companies like Carta, Loom, Oura, Vercel, Dataminr, Opendoor and more.

See you on the other side :)