Startup Transposit Corp. wants to solve developer’s headaches with its new application programming interface composition platform after raising $12.2 million in a new round of funding.

Sutter Hill Ventures led the Series A round, with participation from SignalFire and Unusual Ventures.

APIs can be thought of as a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications. They specify how software components should interact with each other, making it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks needed. A programmer using APIs simply has to put all of those blocks together.

Examples of APIs include the Google Maps API, which lets developers embed Google Maps onto web pages they’re building using a JavaScript or Flash interface. Amazon.com Inc. also offers APIs such as its Product Advertising API, which provides developers with access to its product selection and discovery functions so they can advertise Amazon products to make money from a website.

APIs are all about making life easier for developers, but they introduce new headaches when it becomes necessary to use more than one for a specific app. One of the problems is that developers need to “compose” each API in order to aggregate data and integrate the various mechanisms they enable, and that can be a laborious process.

“API composition is when you pull together multiple API calls from the services you’re using to achieve a desired end result,” Tina Huang, co-founder and chief technology officer at Transposit, told SiliconANGLE.

When building an app that connects to APIs, it’s necessary to make multiple API calls, Huang said. For example, a developer might call an API that returns a number of results, but for each of those results, it becomes necessary to obtain more data, which means more API calls must be made. Or if a call doesn’t provide as many results as needed, another call would be required to obtain more results, Huang said.

Building modern apps generally requires a lot of API calls, Huang said. For example, the average developer in the U.S. uses at least 18 APIs to program an app.

“Since each of these APIs doesn’t behave in the same way, you have to implement the logic to do all those API calls in an efficient manner,” Huang said. “But this ends up muddying up that logic with a bunch of API specific technicalities like how do you authenticate, paginate, et cetera.”

What Transposit does is to make it easier to compose APIs in order to make those calls. Its platform helps to standardize APIs so that they can all be treated in the same way, similarly to Lego blocks that can be snapped together easily to build new structures Huang explained. Transposit also uses a relational database engine that translates standard SQL into optimized execution against APIs.

“Imagine you have all your customer information in one system and your product inventory in another,” Huang said. “We allow developers to specify high level intent like ‘Give me the top 1,000 products for customers in San Francisco.’ And then behind the covers we turn that into a number of efficient API calls.”

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that APIs these days are generally considered to be the “gold standard” for application calls, both internally and externally. However, he said that too much of a good thing can lead to new challenges for developers.

“Combining them [APIs] and forming higher-level constructs is highly desirable for CxOs who want to build next-generation apps,” Mueller said. “New services such as Transposit’s can help to reduce the development and maintenance burden for these apps.”

Transposit said its platform is currently available in public beta. The company plans to charge for its services via a consumption mode, starting at $10 per month for private repositories. It’s also offering a free tier for open-source applications.

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