What Our $6.5M Seed Round Means for WireMock and the WireMock Community

We’ve just announced $6.5 million in seed funding from Ridge Ventures, First Rays Venture Partners, and Scribble Ventures. This is a significant milestone for WireMock - as a product, a company, and a thriving open source community.

You can read the coverage on TechCrunch of SiliconANGLE, but I wanted to take this opportunity to give some more context into how we got here, how we see WireMock and WireMock Cloud moving forward, and how we intend to continue supporting our growing user base – from open source developers to enterprise customers.

How We Got Here

I met Tom in early 2022, and he introduced me to WireMock - the open source mock server he had developed, and the highly engaged community that had formed around it. The more I learned, the more excited I became. 

Having spent the first decade of my career developing software, and the second decade building and selling solutions to developers, I know firsthand how central APIs are in modern software development. And I also saw where this goes wrong and grind developer productivity to a halt: inaccessible 3rd party APIs, flaky sandboxes, and delays in shipping internal APIs that cause teams to sit idle while they wait for the other team’s implementation. The unstoppable rise of microservices only exacerbates this issue, and highlights the need for a solution that’s built for developers who consume APIs – not just the ones building them.

WireMock’s open source software enables every developer to easily mock the services they depend on and enables dev teams to continue building and testing, even when an API isn’t ready. 

Increasing developer productivity and reducing the time to ship working code are essential, and WireMock plays a key role in that for the tens of thousands of developers who use it everyday.  Seeing the massive traction that the OSS already had (including 5.5k GitHub stars and over 4M monthly downloads), it was clear that there is a major opportunity in this market. 

Tom and I decided to join forces to establish WireMock Cloud – a platform built on the OSS, but which expands on its functionality to improve all aspects of API developer productivity. Specifically, we wanted to provide more capabilities when developing in an environment with multiple dependencies on APIs, to simplify hosting and API management, and provide better support for large-scale deployment through a self-service UI.

Hitting the Ground Running

WireMock Cloud was launched with a free edition, which already has tens of thousands of active users. Today we have paying customers from various verticals - banking, fintech, e-commerce, travel, telco, health, energy and many more. Every company needs a mocking platform.

With that success in mind, we developed our strategy to deliver an API developer productivity platform which will take the idea of mocking-first, and apply it to all stages of the API lifecycle: chaos engineering with mock APIs, generating developer portals from mocks,  and more.

To deliver on this vision, and compete against established and well-funded companies in the API space, it was clear that we’d need external funding in order to scale the product and the company.

Today I am happy to share that we were able to secure this funding round. 

The new injection of capital will allow us to deliver on our vision – unlocking developer productivity in complex, API-dependent environments. We will also expand our go-to-market team, with a focus on customer success and technical support, in order to continue serving our growing customer base in the best possible way

Our Commitment to Open Source

WireMock was born in open source, and we are committed to keeping it that way. Investing in the OSS is part of our responsibility, and it also makes good business sense – which is why we intend to continue devoting engineering time and resources to the project, alongside our investment in WireMock Cloud. 

Just as an example, at the time of this writing, we are expanding support for additional popular programming languages by adopting and enhancing 3rd party SDKs, starting with Python. This will be part of the open-source library and freely available to all.

The new funding will allow us to launch more features and content, and to provide better resources to support all users, including the vibrant and active WireMock OSS community.

Here's to You

On a personal note, I am super excited about what we were able to achieve in a short period of time and even more excited about the journey we have ahead of us.

I’d like to thank everyone who has joined us on this journey so far. Your support, engagement, and feedback have been invaluable, and we're looking forward to the next chapter in WireMock's story. Community has been at the heart of our success, and we have no doubt that this will continue to be the case for years to come.

(Oh, and if you’re not already a member – join our community Slack channel)