Apideck Hit $600K ARR With Nine Engineers and One Salesperson

GJ De Wilde was doing $50,000 a month when Nathan asked what cap he had negotiated on his angel round. The guesses in the question were $5 million, then $10 million. “It’s actually larger than that,” De Wilde said. “It’s a little bit between 10 and 15, let us say.”

That is a $10–15 million cap on a company that was at $25,000 a month when the money went in. Nathan asked the obvious follow-up — how did you get that? The answer had almost nothing to do with revenue.

I think what charmed our angels was mostly the amount of customers that are coming inbound discovering Apideck as a platform. Also the amount of connectors and APIs we already shipped with a very small team.

GJ De Wilde, co-founder and CEO, Apideck

“Codat is one of our competitors”

Apideck is a unified API layer: its customer writes one integration, and Apideck maintains the many SaaS platforms sitting behind it. Nathan reached first for Zapier as the analogy and De Wilde pushed back — Apideck goes “one layer beneath that,” delivering the APIs to engineers with the developer experience they already know from Stripe and Twilio.

The second analogy stuck. Nathan put Codat in the fintech lane, alongside Plaid and Teller for financial data, and asked whether that was the shape of the business. De Wilde took it: “Exactly. And Codat is one of our competitors.” Asked flatly whether Apideck was better, he said “Definitely” — and then argued scope rather than quality.

The market argument underneath it was the one he made most forcefully all interview, and it is a distribution argument, not a technology one.

If you don’t have integrations, you’re dead in the water and you need to integrate with larger platforms like NetSuite, Workday, but also Salesforce. And those companies are never going to integrate with you. And that’s where you really can benefit from the power of unified APIs.

The contract value that doesn’t multiply out

Average contract value is “around 10 k,” De Wilde said — correcting himself mid-answer from per month to per year. Seventy-five customers at $10,000 a year is about $750,000. The run rate he confirmed minutes later was $600,000. He did not dodge the gap: “We are getting there,” then pointed at a second, cheaper product. “It’s a bit of a blend of the two.”

75 customers × ~$10K a year = ~$750KThe run rate confirmed on the same tape is $600K. A lower-ACV second product pulls the blended average down.

Asked for MRR directly, he gave the number and the target in one breath: “Around 50,000. Then we’re going to be at 1,000,000 ARR very soon.” A year earlier it had been $25,000 a month, which is where the 100% growth in the headline comes from — and $50,000 a month is a $600,000 annual run rate on the nose.

Pricing pulls two levers, neither of them seats: volume of API calls, and how many of the unified APIs a customer switches on. The thing Apideck deliberately does not meter is the number of end integrations a customer connects to — which, De Wilde said, is exactly why customers love it. They buy building blocks, not a per-connection tariff.

What keeps 100 connectors from breaking

Nathan’s scepticism here came from his own books: Founderpath integrates six or seven APIs, he said, and it takes two full-time engineers just to keep them current every week. How does a ten-person company keep 100 alive?

We initially invest a lot of resource in trying to automate as much as we can of the magic internally by looking at how other APIs behave, creating specs around those APIs to have a real contract, how they should behave.

• Specs as the contract — his answer to the favourite-tool question was not a tool but a concept: OpenAPI specs, which pin down how each third-party API is supposed to behave and drive most of the automation.
• Portman, open source — Apideck built its own API monitoring solution and released it; it watches the upstream APIs for changes so customer integrations don’t break silently.
• Nine categories, 100+ connectors — e-commerce and issue tracking were the two unified APIs shipped in the month before the interview, with about 15 new connectors in four weeks.
• The number he is building toward — “from the 100 connectors in the coming years to 1,000 or maybe 2,000 different connectors for our customers.”

Nine of the ten staff are technical, and De Wilde counts his co-founder among the engineers. They also run daily customer support themselves — “which our customers also love.” The single commercial hire was recent, and his job is outbound, not replacing the inbound: “We really believe in doubling down our PLG approach.”

The funding ladder

Burning $30,000 a month, and calm about it

Apideck is not profitable and does not pretend to be. “We’re still burning each month, but it’s manageable at this point,” De Wilde said; net burn is “around 30” thousand a month against a raise of more than $1 million that mostly landed in 2022. Does the burn make him nervous? “No. Not at all. We have a lot of great investors who are looking to do more.”

$10–15Mthe SAFE cap negotiated while Apideck was doing $25,000 a month

• 2018 · First product Launched by De Wilde and his brother, funded by a few small angel tickets and early paying customers.
• Dec 2021 · $300K Revenue recorded in GetLatka’s data — the $25,000 a month he describes as “one year ago.”
• Late 2021 · The unified APIs The first unified APIs shipped “one and a half year ago” as of the interview, seven years after the company started.
• May 2022 · $1M SAFE Recorded at a $13 million valuation, mid-point of the “between 10 and 15” band he describes. Angel money; no VC on the cap table.
• Dec 2022 · $600K Revenue recorded — the run rate he confirms on tape three months later.
• Mar 2023 · Raising again GetLatka logs a “Raising Now” entry the same week as the interview. Size undecided: “Really depends on the market environment.”

The VC round was deliberately deferred rather than unavailable. “We have a lot of VC interest, but we’re actually trying to hit the right metrics first before actually putting the pedal to the metal.” The cap was set the same way — high enough “to also make it work for the rest of the team,” and high enough to force the metrics that justify it.

$30 million, all cash, today

Nathan ran his standard trap: a $5 million round at a $30 million valuation on one side, a $30 million all-cash acquisition of the whole company on the other. Would you sell?

Never.

GJ De Wilde, asked whether he would take $30M cash for Apideck

Asked separately what he would value the company at, he declined to name a figure at all — his stated target is a decacorn, the ambition Nathan repeated back in the outro. At $600,000 of ARR, that is a long way to compound; at 32 years old with 100 connectors shipped and no VC yet on the cap table, he clearly considers the clock to be early rather than late.

Since the tape

Apideck’s later rows in the GetLatka dataset carry the story past the interview, and they are not contemporaneous with anything above. Revenue is recorded at about $1.29 million as of October 2024 — flagged as an estimate, so treat it as a modelled figure rather than a founder-stated one — with headcount at 13, up from the 10 on the tape. The $1 million SAFE at a $13 million cap remains the only round on record.

One record discrepancy worth naming: GetLatka’s company row lists Apideck’s founding year as 2020, while De Wilde says on tape the first product launched in 2018 and the unified APIs about eighteen months before the interview. The tape is the better source for both dates. Current figures live on Apideck’s GetLatka profile.

The famous five

Five hours of sleep a night. A girlfriend, no kids, 32 years old. The CEO he studies is Jason Lemkin — “not really a CEO anymore, but I love the content that he’s putting out daily.” The favourite book is Frank Slootman’s, the Snowflake CEO; neither man could remember the title on air, only that the cover is blue. The favourite tool for building Apideck is not a tool: OpenAPI specs, “more like a concept, but that’s really what’s driving most of our automation.”

And the last question — what he wishes he had known at 20 — got the answer of a founder who spent three years pre-revenue before the product that worked:

That you need to have patience, that you can’t brute force any problem, that you need to wait for the right moment for a certain idea or concept to get traction. So be patient and then you will get lucky.

GJ De Wilde, co-founder and CEO, Apideck

Sources Nathan Latka’s interview with GJ De Wilde, recorded March 2023 and published to YouTube on 30 March 2023 — all guest-stated figures. Dated revenue, funding, headcount and customer rows from GetLatka’s Apideck record; the October 2024 revenue row and the 75-customer row are flagged estimates in that dataset.