Welcoming Runscope

I am incredibly pleased to announce True’s investment in Runscope, an infrastructure company focused on helping developers build better API-driven applications.

Over the past few years, the number of web and mobile applications driven by web service APIs has exploded. This includes not only the many well-known open public APIs and infrastructure services, but a growing number of private, internal APIs, as more and more companies shift over to a service-oriented architecture. As a result of this shift, there is a growing need for new tools to give application developers better visibility into how their applications are working with the services they rely on.

When we met Runscope Co-Founders John Sheehan and Frank Stratton late last year, many of our companies were hacking together these tools internally—taking multiple engineers away from product to focus on better understanding their underlying infrastructure. As part of our process, we introduced John and Frank to different companies in our portfolio. All of them signed up for Runscope’s service, and many of them are already using the product today.

The Runscope team is uniquely suited to attack the API management challenge. John and Frank were early employees at Twilio, one of the first modern infrastructure service companies, where John was the first developer evangelist and Frank was the technical lead for the Twillio API team. After Twillio, John was the Platform lead at IFTT working with API providers to create new channels, and is a well-known thought leader in the API ecosystem.

Runscope’s initial product offers a solution to a very real pain point, which, combined with the team’s deep expertise, will significantly impact how developers work with APIs. We couldn’t be more pleased to be leading Runscope’s Seed round.

John, Frank and the entire Runscope team, welcome to True!