💰 How Two High School Students Raised $500K in Investments
Two school friends, Christopher and Nicholas, just graduated from high school. Instead of taking a break or preparing for college, they dedicated themselves entirely to their startup, APIGen. They aim to create a platform to build custom APIs from natural language prompts.
API (Application Programming Interface) is an interface through which one program can ask another to perform specific actions or provide data.
👋 How the Team Was Formed
The teenagers met on the school's debate team and bonded over their shared interest in programming. Their first project was a chatbot for data exchange. Despite the lack of originality in the idea, they realized that the technology was based on APIs and that creating APIs is a complex task for many users.
🆗 How Teenagers from Colorado Managed to Impress Investors
After creating the first version of the application, they started sending cold messages to venture investors on LinkedIn. One of the recipients was Philip Broenniman, founder of Varana Capital in Denver. Broenniman and Varana's COO agreed to meet with the teenagers.
We went into the meeting thinking we were going to provide some fatherly, avuncular advice; provide some words of wisdom. After two hours of their presentation, we walked out, thinking that this was the best presentation we had heard in the last five years. We were blown away by the cogent insights these two 18-year-olds gave.
Philip Broenniman, Varana Capital
After this meeting, a venture fund invested $500,000 in the startup.
🔗 What is APIGen For?
APIGen is designed to create APIs based on simple prompts that are understandable even to users without programming experience.
For example, an employee of an online store can create an API to connect the website to a database in just a few clicks. Or a drone user might need an API to instruct the drone on how to navigate a territory and capture images.
Let’s wish the boys good luck with their project!
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