This 18-year-old’s Startup Could Accelerate Development Time

Every once in a while, something comes along that disrupts the app development cycle and makes the whole process easier and more accessible. Development times have been trending down ever since the first companies started stocking the shelves of the App Store, thanks to developer best practices and products designed to “plug-and-play” common app needs. Custom code will always be needed, but best practices allow developers to take shortcuts without cutting corners.

RapidAPI, a young startup from a prodigy mobile app developer in San Francisco, is poised to make development even faster by solving a major problem with the current developer ecosystem: confusing, non-standardized APIs.

Included in the latest batch from 500 Startups, RapidAPI is notable for another reason as well — the 18-year-old founder is barely out of high school, and recently relocated to San Francisco with monetary assistance from an Israeli investor.

Since then, RapidAPI has closed $3.5 million in seed funding from venture capitalists who are impressed with the young coder’s mission and ability.

In spite of the fact that the API ecosystem drives many major apps and services, including much of Amazon and eBay, the problem with them is the “translation” between one company and another. RapidAPI essentially acts as a “translator,” boiling down hundreds (and eventually thousands) of APIs into standardized formats so new startups can plug-and-play through RapidAPI rather than the third-party API developer directly. This allows web and iOS app developers to save an enormous amount of time on translation and maintenance, getting off the ground quickly and leaving the experts at RapidAPI to deal with broken links and other upkeep issues.

For now, the young app developers at RapidAPI are concentrated on the most important feature of a seed-stage startup: rapid growth. The company plans to grow by a factor of ten within the year. App developers are rooting for them.