Blobr, a startup headquartered in Paris and specializing in the no-code development sector, has secured €1.2 million in pre-seed funding to simplify the process of exposing and generating revenue from existing APIs for businesses.

Seedcamp, a pan-European investor focusing on pre-seed and seed stages, spearheaded the funding round. Additional participation came from New Wave, Kima, and a group of individual investors. This investment marks the first for New Wave, a recently established European venture capital firm co-founded by Pia d’Iribarne and Jean de la Rochebrochard, following their announcement of a $56 million fund backed by prominent investors such as Xavier Niel of Iliad, Peter Fenton of Benchmark, and Tony Fadell, known for his work at Apple.

Founded by Alexandre Airvault (CEO) and Alexandre Mai (CTO), Blobr intends to establish itself as the primary platform for managing and monetizing APIs from a business and product perspective. The company’s goal is to allow individuals in product and business roles to oversee and profit from a company’s application programming interfaces without requiring specialized technical skills or diverting engineering resources. By enabling this, the startup anticipates a surge in innovative API applications as more third parties gain access to commercial data and functionality for further development.

“Our vision is for companies to move beyond viewing APIs simply as conduits and instead treat them as fully-fledged products to maximize their potential,” states Airvault. “This necessitates pricing, customization, and management strategies focused on the end-user experience, not solely on technical considerations.”

Blobr is engineered to empower product and business leaders to transform data sharing into a revenue-generating opportunity, while simultaneously lessening their reliance on technical teams. “We are confident that this methodology will be instrumental in advancing the evolution of data exchange,” he explains.

Blobr’s no-code technology currently provides a comprehensive suite of features. It allows for the filtering of sensitive or GDPR-protected information from existing internal APIs, the delivery of tailored API outputs based on customer segments to ensure data privacy, and the integration of API usage with various business models, including usage-based pricing and Stripe subscriptions.

Airvault identifies competitors as established API management solutions offered by companies like Google, IBM, Axway, and MuleSoft. “These platforms are primarily designed for internal APIs and aren’t optimized for managing APIs as independent products. They cater to technical users, while Blobr, with its no-code approach, is specifically built for product and business professionals to minimize the need for technical involvement,” he clarifies.