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How two high schoolers revolutionized the API industry

Best buddies Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot graduated high school a few weeks ago. Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are in a Boulder, Colorado VC office when most adolescents their age are having fun in their last summer before college or adulthood.

Varana Capital gave them $500,000 pre-seed funding for APIGen, which they are working on this summer. Fitzgerald will attend Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot will move near the institution but forgo education to launch a startup.

After a prototype of their proposal caught the attention of Boulder's AI community, they raised the money in high school. APIGen is creating a platform to develop APIs using natural language instructions. For instance, an e-commerce shop can request an API to connect its online front end to its database, and the platform will provide it. By API, the creators don't just mean a traditional "application programming interface" that lets apps exchange data or perform minor workflow tasks. APIGen should build complicated bespoke APIs for multiple or serial tasks.

“We're actually generating the code for the APIs so that you can have business logic, actual custom functionalities within those APIs,” Van Landschoot told TechCrunch. Fitzgerald claims his business targets IoT devices as well as web apps and databases.