Communications startup Nylas Inc. is gunning for the booming application programming interface economy after raising $120 million in a new round of funding that brings its total amount raised to $175 million.

Tiger Global Management led the Series C round, which saw participation from a host of other backers. Existing investors Citi Ventures, Slack Fund, 8VC, Round13 Capital, ScaleUP Ventures, Scale Asia Ventures and Tony Fadell, founder of Google LLC-owned Nest and a principal at Future Shape, were all involved. New investors included Owl Rock Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, and individuals who included Patrick Collison, co-founder and chief executive of Stripe Inc., his brother John Collison and Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna Bank AB.

Nylas sells an API platform that businesses and developers can use to integrate key productivity features such as email, contacts, calendar and scheduling functionality into their apps. The platform integrates with major email services from the likes of Google, Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo Inc. and it saves developers a lot of work.

Rather than create multiple integrations for each of those different services and keep them maintained and up to date, developers can just use Nylas to bypass those hurdles, making it possible for users to send and receive emails directly through their apps. Nylas’ communications API platform is similar to Twilio Inc., which offers APIs to build video calling capabilities into apps, and Stripe, which makes its payments processing platform available through APIs.

Today’s round comes at a time when API use is booming in the enterprise. ORather than building their own infrastructure from scratch, organizations can tap into purpose-built APIs from third parties to bring immediate functionality to their applications.

Nylas’ customers include the cloud communications firm Dialpad Inc., which provides full functionality with email, calendar and contacts from within its own platform. It uses the Nylas API to ensure all data is constantly kept in sync between Dialpad and the email service provider account.

More recently, Nylas has stepped up its game with the launch of a new neural API earlier this year. It helps users to aggregate, analyze and process vast amounts of email-related data and transform it into insights.

The API brings many additional capabilities. For instance, the neural API can distinguish between human-to-human messages and detect things such as a shipping confirmation email, then send an automated response or a notification to the right team member. Further, it can extrapolate information from email signatures to update a user’s contact list automatically.

“The fundamental shift towards digital communications and connectivity has companies across all industries increasingly leaning on developers to solve critical business challenges and build engaging product experiences,” said Nylas co-founder and CEO Gleb Polyakov. “APIs have become core to modern software development and digital transformation.”

Nylas said it plans to use the new funding to continue making investments in its platform, with a focus on security, components and automation features that use artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Image: Nylas