The MMC Ventures-led Series A funding will be used to accelerate Tyk’s presence in rapidly-growing markets, specifically the US, where the company has established itself as the key challenger brand in the API space against competitors like Google’s Apigee, CA Technologies, and IBM. Tyk will be opening an office in Atlanta this summer to add to the Singapore office opened in 2017.
Tyk’s API gateway and management platform serves as a powerful management and security layer between APIs, to make it easier than ever for businesses to harness their power on a huge scale. Programmers and developers across organisations find it difficult to connect systems simply, securely and at scale. Whether it’s your mobile banking app displaying your balance, or allowing you to buy a coffee with your phone, API Management Platforms like Tyk’s solve this problem. Tyk’s product acts as a security layer between the organisation’s API and those who require access to it.
Engineering teams use Tyk solutions to build cutting edge web platforms and create value across the retail, finance, telecoms, healthcare, media, and public sectors. Sephora France, the LVMH-owned, global cosmetics retailer, uses Tyk to secure their entire API programme, which powers their e-commerce platform, mobile apps, and customer loyalty programme. Tyk allows Sephora to build API-driven services that are easy to maintain and safe to use, even during peak Black Friday traffic of 8m+ API calls. The LVMH-owned Sephora France uses Tyk to power 100% of API traffic Average daily traffic is around 3-4 million but this can double or triple during peaks like Black Friday.
The MMC Ventures-led Series A funding will enable Tyk to accelerate its expansion into the US, its second biggest market after EMEA and soon home to a brand new office. Core teams in EMEA and APAC will also be bolstered with more engineers, to ensure the Tyk community continues to receive the hands-on technical help it knows and loves, as well as an innovative Enterprise-level open source API gateway.
“The market for API management is going through a significant shift,” says Dan Bailey, who led the investment for MMC Ventures. “The number of connected services are exploding thanks to increasing demand for interoperability of products and the growth of API driven business models. The rise of DevOps in the Enterprise and shift to microservice architectures are driving the need for new, nimble products and a shift away from legacy API platforms.”
He added, “The team at Tyk have consistently impressed us with their dedication and vision to shaping a better set of products and practices for the industry – engineers love the product, as well as the flexibility and extensibility of the platform.”
The idea behind Tyk was developed when the company’s founder, Martin Buhr, couldn’t find a lightweight, performant, and flexible API Gateway – so he built one himself and open sourced it. Since then, Tyk has grown to over 50 staff and has clients around the world including Starbucks, Domino’s and the UK Ministry of Justice.
Martin Buhr, Co-Founder and CEO at Tyk, comments: “We want to help engineers build great products that open up data and connect systems, with APIs at their core. Because we genuinely care about our community, there’s a huge desire to do things differently, whether it’s our practices to support work-life balance or our Enterprise-grade level open source API gateway. For us it’s all about working to create the best quality API Management tools that we can.”
The community of engineers who work with APIs are at the heart of what Tyk does. The Tyk open source Gateway (available for free from Tyk’s Github) is exactly the same one used by 175 paying customers as part of their Enterprise API Management Platform.
This commitment to open source doesn’t stop at product innovation and distribution. Creating hyper-flexible and remote-by-default working practices has allowed Tyk to bootstrap to a global team of more than 50 people to date, in some cases hiring directly from their open source community.
Tyk is determined to prove that a business can put the needs of the open source community at its core and still be profitable. The company will remain committed to maintaining their open source tools, whether used by hobbyists, students learning their craft, or corporate teams.
