We started standardlibrary in 2016 with a simple vision: web APIs should be first-class citizens of your development environment. Both developers and service providers should be able to publish, integrate with and manipulate Enterprise-grade APIs with the same ease-of-use they build and share documents or spreadsheets. We built the Standard Library serverless platform and API registry as a first step towards fulfilling this vision.

As it stands, Standard Library combines a scalable compute (hosting) layer with automatically generated documentation, authentication, billing, and more: enabling anybody to turn simple JavaScript functions into production-ready APIs in seconds.

Today, we are thrilled to talk about two major steps forward in our path to achieve the vision we’ve outlined:

We are introducing a new product, Code.xyz, an in-browser code editor — an embeddable development environment for easily building APIs, webhooks, and workflow automation tasks that run atop standardlibrary infrastructure. We are humbled to officially announce $2M in strategic funding from Stripe, who many of you know as the payments platform for high-growth startups and technology-forward companies, bringing our funding total to $4M. They join a growing number of API and platform companies supporting us in our mission: Slack is an investor in our seed round, and MessageBird is both a customer and Enterprise partner of standardlibrary.

Code.xyz

Code.xyz is an online code editor. It was carefully hand-crafted to power API development: specialized for webhooks, workflow automation tasks, and, of course, general API design tooling. You can think of it almost like the Google Docs for API development and publishing — our goal is to (1) significantly reduce repetitive API development work for professional engineers, as well as (2) increasingly provide less technical knowledge workers greater access to writing software and utilizing Enterprise-quality integrations.

Organizations can use the standalone editor on code.xyz to:

Quickly design and prototype APIs with complete documentation

Share these API design specs internally or with clients

Ship these APIs to production using immutable version control

Never worry about endpoint scaling: the standardlibrary cloud auto-scales

Manage and share API templates (sources) within your organization or the standardlibrary community as a whole

Additionally, you can use the editor as an embedded widget in your documentation:

Onboard developers to your APIs with shippable, production-ready examples

Provide customers the ability to write custom logic in response to webhooks

We’ll be releasing more features around embedding in the coming weeks. The widget you see below is a Code.xyz embed. We’ve pre-loaded it with a simple “hello world” API project. To get started, try simply hitting “Run” in the bottom right to build the function as an API and execute it.

Why Code.xyz?

At standardlibrary we have been very focused on the future of software development. Mostly, we’ve been ruminating on the question: how will serverless computing change software development? The answer jumped out at us pretty early on: by removing barriers to entry to shipping software, serverless computing allows developers to spend less time worrying about operational implementation of code and spend more time working on integration of pre-existing pieces, or shipping units of integration themselves. Hence, a library of software - a “standard library” of APIs.

We hypothesized that by building a “standard library” layer, and baking in hosting, scaling, documentation, SDK generation, gateway functionality and more as part of the product, the resulting abstraction layer would increasingly allow less technical individuals greater access to building and utilizing web-based compute and provide more technical individuals a rapid development, iteration, and shipping process for APIs.

For the last 18 months, we’ve relied on word-of-mouth and simple command line tooling to enable developers to build with the Standard Library platform. Though we’ve been humbled by the community response to date, after reaching tens of thousands of developers we identified two roadblocks to our continued growth. The first is that for less technical individuals, asking them to install command line tools introduces a pretty high barrier to entry to using our product. The second is that for more technical individuals, there is a lot of noise in the “serverless” computing space and attempting to explain what we provide at standardlibrary above and beyond a typical serverless platform is less effective than just showing developers through an intuitive, familiar web interface. Code.xyz was engineered from scratch to remove these roadblocks, providing a bespoke experience for our developers and community.

$2M in Financing from Stripe

Around the time we were trying to answer our questions about the future of software development, we managed to find a great connection with the team at Stripe. Stripe’s mission, to grow the GDP of the internet by enabling new business models and lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship, resonated immediately with our own goals. We strongly believe in lowering the barriers-to-entry to both software development and API integration as a means to propel businesses forward.

Today we are humbled to officially announce $2M in strategic financing from a company we deeply respect and admire, bringing our funding total to $4M. The team at Stripe has been amazingly forthcoming and a pleasure to work with. We are especially grateful to Patrick and John Collison for their unbelievable support of our vision — and we'd also like to give a shoutout to Romain Huet, who published a wonderful guide to Stripe Payments with standardlibrary on GitHub.

We look forward to creating a more open, easily accessible software and API development landscape for everybody. The serverless computing revolution is still in its infancy, with much more to build and create. We eagerly open our arms to new and veteran developers alike. We would be thrilled to have your support.

If you are as excited about the future of software and API development as we are, please do check out our open positions at standardlibrary.

Thank you for reading and being a part of our journey,