api

Former Tink employees launch Atlar, a payment automation startup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in api, Atlar, bank payment, Fintech, StartupsNo Comments

Stockholm-based startup Atlar raised a $5 million (€5 million) seed round led by Index Ventures. The company has been working on an application programming interface (API) that facilitates bank-to-bank payments for European businesses. In addtion to Index Ventures, La Famiglia VC, Cocoa and various business angels also participated in the round, such as Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former EVP of global sales at Adyen Thijn Lamers and N26 CFO Jan Kemper. While European consumers are already quite familiar with open banking and payment initiation, a lot of B2B transfers are still processed manually. Business banking hasn’t experienced the same level of innovation when it comes to payments. And yet, corporate banks already offer ways to initiate payments without having to connect to a web portal and upload a spreadsheet. But banks don’t necessarily run modern REST APIs. They expect a text file formatted in a very specific way on an SFTP server. If you have a development team, they could build a custom integration. But many companies simply don’t have the resources to maintain these connections. They would rather pay a partner to handle all the technical details. Atlar provides a modern API that hides all the complexities involved with bank connections. Once a company uses Atlar, it can trigger transfers, reconcile transactions and process direct debits through Atlar’s API directly. In particular, Atlar can be used for payouts, insurance premiums, deposits and loan payouts. Companies that operate across multiple European countries likely have multiple bank accounts. That’s why automating payments could be a nice upgrade for those businesses. “Accepting payments as a business is pretty painless now, but initiating them with your bank is still agonisingly slow and manual,” Atlar co-founder and CEO Joel Nordström said in a statement. “This is why Atlar is on a journey to becoming the operating system for bank-based payments. By creating a new category, we hope to unleash a wave of innovation for our clients which will ultimately benefit European consumers and businesses.” In addition to Joel Nordström, Joel Wägmark and Johannes Elgh are the two other co-founders. They were all working at Tink, the open banking company that was acquired by Visa for $2.2 billion. Atlar competes with Numeral, a French startup that I covered earlier this year. So far, Atlar focuses on the Nordics, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And today’s funding round will be helpful when it comes to European expansion.

Bump builds a central hub for all your APIs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in api, bump, Bump.sh, dev tool, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Bump, a French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs across your organization. The company automatically generates documentation for your APIs so that other teams always know how to use certain APIs. Over time, Bump becomes the central repository for all things related to your APIs. It acts as a single source of truth with information that remains up to date and changelogs so that you can see what’s new. This summer, the company raised a $4 million funding round (€4 million) led by Galion.exe and Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund. Business angels also participated in the round. An API is an application programming interface. Developers use APIs so that two different services or applications can interact with each other. Companies also use APIs for their own internal use cases. By relying on APIs, different teams can work on different parts of the same application. All they have to do is make sure that they are using APIs properly to push changes or fetch information from a different area of the product. And that’s where Bump is particularly useful. APIs break all the time. Development teams change some parameters, add attributes, improve a feature or send a different result than the one expected. “There are even team members that are less technical that use APIs,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Charrier told me. “Product, developer relationship or marketing people need to know what’s happening.” That’s why Bump has built a documentation generator for APIs. It works with both RESTful and message-driven APIs, which makes it stand out from other solutions that tend to focus on RESTful APIs. You can integrate it in your workflow in many different ways. For instance, you can trigger Bump using a GitHub action, use Bump’s command-line interface in a script, or interact with Bump using Bump’s own API — yes, it’s an API for APIs. The idea is that everyone in the company can start using Bump, even if some teams do things differently. Once all the APIs are documented on Bump, whenever there’s a change, Bump can send notifications and highlight changes compared to the previous version. The result is that Bump becomes the API portal for the entire company. When someone joins the company, they can easily see the logic behind some components just by browsing Bump’s hub. When I talked with Sébastien Charrier, he compared Bump’s approach to GitHub. You can always export your documentation and leave the platform, but the nice thing about Bump is that you can see all the diffs. Up next, the startup wants to turn its product into a collaboration platform. And that’s what’s going to improve the product’s stickiness. So far, 250 companies are actively using the product, such as Meilisearch, Memo Bank, Canopy Servicing and Forto. The startup plans to hire 20 people in the coming months.