Nokia, once the world's largest mobile phone company but now primarily a provider of infrastructure and services to carriers, made the acquisition with the aim of becoming a bridge between the worlds of technology and communications. Acquired Rapid (formerly RapidAPI), a startup that operates an API marketplace. Nokia plans to integrate Rapid into the platform it is building to help 5G carriers open up their networks to more developers.
Raghav Sahgal, President, Cloud and Network Services, Noka We need to build bridges,” the statement said.
The deal includes a public marketplace, enterprise services, and an enterprise-grade API hub designed for building, testing, and sharing APIs internally and externally.
Terms of the contract were not disclosed in the official announcement. Rapid was once valued at $1 billion and counted 4 million users using around 40,000 APIs. The companies are not disclosing the current number of active users of Rapid, other than that it is in the thousands and the number of APIs is in the hundreds. Since Nokia is publicly traded, more financial information may be revealed in future filings.
The technology landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, with many late-stage startups having difficulty achieving the lofty projections they set while raising significant funding in better years. I feel that it is. (Rapid's $1 billion valuation is based on funding rounds starting in 2022.)
Rapid rose to prominence during the boom in interest in APIs a decade ago, when APIs first emerged as webs between a disparate number of apps and other services. Rapid's pitch was to provide a one-stop place to find and use APIs in what appears to be a highly fragmented market.
But it's unclear whether Rapid has found a way to make money by offering that service. Rapid's founder, Ido Gino (a genius who founded the company in 2015 at just 17 years old), will step down as CEO in April 2023 and be replaced by Mark Friend. In the weeks that followed, the startup cut its workforce with at least two major layoffs. 82% increase (cue the company's “rapid decline” headline).
San Francisco-based Rapid had raised about $273 million in venture funding from prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, SoftBank and others.
It's unclear how many people are actually at Rapid at this point, or how many will join Nokia in this deal. Nokia's statement emphasizes products over people, highlighting “technology assets such as the world's largest API hub and its highly skilled R&D department, used by thousands of active developers around the world.” It is pointed out that they are being acquired.
The acquisition is an interesting and somewhat ironic development for Nokia, given the Finnish company's history as a pioneer in the mobile world.
Back in the 1990s, Nokia led the way in building mobile networks around the world and became the world's No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer. But in the 2000s, it missed the boat on the smartphone transition led by Apple and Google (and the hundreds of other companies that built on Samsung and Google's Android operating system). Some argue that one of Nokia's biggest failures is its inability to create an extensible ecosystem for apps and third parties to build for its smartphones. It is interesting, therefore, that the company is now positioning itself as an enabler of exactly that purpose.
Specifically, Nokia believes there is an opportunity for carriers to further accelerate the development of 5G networks, which are currently being built but are often underutilized. The carriers want more third parties to build applications and other services on these networks, they say, and have launched a new “Network as Code” platform to do that. Rapid's API framework exists as part of that effort. Nokia said carriers and other service providers registered on the platform include BT, DISH, Google Cloud, Infobip, Orange, Telefonica, Telecom Argentina and 20 others.
“We are pleased to partner with Nokia,” Rapid CEO Friend said in a statement. “By combining Rapid's API technology and R&D expertise with Nokia's scale, network and API domain expertise, we will be able to expand our broader API ecosystem.”