Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture firms, is betting that a startup called Mashape Inc. can stand out among the numerous providers promising to help developers better manage their application programming interfaces.

The fund underscored its support today with an $18 million investment that also included contributions from existing backers CRV and Index Ventures. The round comes a week after shares of MuleSoft Inc., one of the industry’s top API management providers, jumped 44 percent in their first day of trading. Its stock market debut marked the latest in a series of successful public offerings for companies working to make money from the so-called API economy, a streak that the three venture firms no doubt took into account before backing Mashape.

The startup is challenging MuleSoft and the other publicly traded contenders out there with Kong, an open-source platform that promises to help developers handle the API requests sent to their applications more easily. Mashape claims that the software provides the ability to create a programming interface without having to manually sort out the operational details, easily add security features using third-party plugins and set various restrictions on user activity.

The startup offers Kong alongside two commercial products designed to complement its core capabilities. Galileo, as the first tool is known, can provide insight into how an API is used, while the other offering goes by Gelato and makes it possible to create a custom knowledge base for developers looking to interact with an application. Companies have a choice between deploying the solutions on a standalone basis or buying Mashape Enterprise, which bundles them with commercial support services.

Intel Corp., Harvard University and the New York Times are among the organizations that are using the startup’s premium products. Mashape claims to have 30 paying customers in total.

The startup has a large installed base: Chief Executive Augusto Marietti wrote in a blog post today that Kong has been downloaded more than 2 million times to date, while the number of active deployments today is 27 times higher than it was last year. As part of its commercialization effort, Mashape plans to develop more features that can enterprise customers run their implementations most efficiently. Reliability, security and support for multi-data center environments are among the priorities that Marietti highlighted in his post.

Mashape has raised a total of $26.1 million in outside capital.

Image: Mashape