Mashery and customers at the recent SXSW in Austin, Texas
Tech giant Intel has acquired Mashery, a provider of API technology that helps major brands, including the Guardian, USA Today, Klout and Rovi, use APIs to build new revenue models and powerful web experiences for their users. Mashery, founded in 2006, has a network of more than 200,000 developers.
Prior to the acquisition, Mashery raised up to US$34.7m in funding from investors that include a variety of venture capital firms, as well as Cisco and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.
While the acquisition price hasn’t been disclosed, there has been speculation that the price may have been up to three times more than Mashery’s last recorded valuation of US$60m.
Mashery employs 124 people and it is understood that the majority of these workers will join Intel’s Services Division.
The company works with more than 170 leading brands to power more than 44,000 active applications created by 200,000 developers.
As the company says itself on its website, web-based APIs are exploding in popularity as the technology of choice for cost-effective distribution of digital content and services.
But where it potentially gets interesting for Intel is the fact that APIs are moving from being primarily web-based entities that typically take the form of a URL to appearing on a variety of web-connected devices, such as wearable sensors for health monitoring and more.
