StepZen Inc., a new developer tooling startup, today launched with $8 million in initial funding and a platform that it says can enable software teams to build applications more quickly. 

The startup is led by former executives from Apigee, a provider of application programming interface tools that Google LLC acquired for $625 million. StepZen Chief Executive Officer Anant Jhingran was Apigee’s chief technology officer.

Enterprise applications retrieve the data they process from a so-called backend such as a database, a customer relationship management platform or some other system of record. Making sure that information retrieval goes smoothly can require significant amounts of code. The task is even more time-consuming in complex applications that rely on multiple backends, for example an e-commerce platform that retrieves catalog items from a product database and purchase recommendations from a marketing system.

StepZen’s goal is to ease the creation of such workflows. The startup’s platform enables developers to build, with relatively little work, an API that automatically handles the logistics of retrieving data from a backend system. Developers only need to write a query describing what data their application needs and StepZen handles the rest.

StepZen’s platform uses the open-source GraphQL tool to ensure that backends only fetches the information strictly relevant to a query. This reduces the risk of applications receiving more data than they need, a fairly common issue that slows down performance. In applications that use multiple backends, StepZen can automatically identify the systems containing the requested information and, if needed, normalize data points stored in different formats. 

One of the reasons building application data workflows can be complicated is the need to write code for handling errors. There are numerous moving parts that can break inside a production application and developers must mitigate the risk. To ease this aspect of software projects, StepZen offers pre-packaged error handling features and, if a technical issue interferes with information retrieval, its platform can retry the request.

The startup’s investors seem to believe that it has spotted a promising market opportunity. The $8 million in initial funding StepZen announced today was provided by Neotribe Ventures and Wing Venture Capital. With the funds, Jhingran told TechCrunch, the startup intends to expand its current 11-person staff and continue development work on the platform, which is currently in alpha. 

StepZen plans to make the platform available as a software-as-a-service offering in early 2021.

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