Ming Wen and Yuansheng Wang have worked as engineers in internet giants for more than ten years and communicated with engineers from different companies through various open-source community meetings and conferences. In the process, they found that more and more engineers will develop around connections like API and microservices. However, the engineers also have pain points such as API management, observability, and rapid product release.

Therefore, at the beginning of 2019, after the New Year, Ming and Yuansheng decided to launch API7.ai, an open-source infra software company, hoping to use API gateway as a starting point to help global enterprises to build digital platforms more efficiently, reliably, and safely.

Two months after the company’s launch on June 6, 2019, APISIX, a project still in the demo stage, was open-sourced on GitHub. APISIX has maintained the tradition of monthly holding one release/meetup/online meetup.

APISIX has a clear picture from its first day: becoming the most popular API gateway project worldwide, serving half of its API requests. Therefore, APISIX has no way but to take the open-source road to make this vision possible.

Ming and Yuansheng wrote code day and night for a whole year in a small office with no windows during the starting period. The core and significant features of APISIX were born there.

Also, this year, APISIX successfully entered the Apache incubator six months after being open-sourced.

The picture is Ming Wen and Justin, Chair of the Apache incubator, at the Huawei Connect Conference in 2019. At this time, Ming and Yuansheng asked Justin and Craig, the Former Chair of the Apache Software Foundation, many questions about the Apache incubator and Apache culture.

There were only 20 contributors at Apache APISIX when it first became an Apache incubator project. Our biggest challenge is to involve diverse engineers from multiple groups and become a global project. No matter how arduous the process is, we will stick to our bottom line: Honesty. Every GitHub Star and contributor gets natural growth through simple methods like meetups and articles. Each open-source project has its own culture and style that would attract similar people with the same attitude.

In 2019, there were no financing and paying customers. Yet, under tremendous financial pressure, the engineers’ ideals and perseverance helped these two engineers get over the predicament. The picture below is the first time the Apache APISIX logo appeared in print.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 swept the world. It was also at this time that API7.ai started Angel-round financing. ZhenFund invested in us; indeed, as demonstrated by its name, it is the most friendly VC (venture capital) for entrepreneurs. We established mutual reliance and started our cooperation only by communicating with ZhenFund through Zoom rather than face to face, which seems impossible for other VCs.

After completing the Angel-round financing, we changed to the office next door, where we could comfortably enjoy the sunshine.

We then started recruiting more engineers, and our team grew gradually from only two people to a group. They are all from the open-source community of Apache APISIX. Thanks for their trust!

In July 2020, Apache APISIX graduated and became a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation. During this process, the Apache culture influenced APISIX and the commercial company - API7.ai. Keeping discussions open and public and preserving transparency and diversity is just as important to the open-source community as it is for commercial companies.

As more and more developers and companies start to try Apache APISIX, APISIX is becoming increasingly stable and easy to use, forming a virtuous circle, which is the real magic of open-source.

We never focus on GitHub Star but always focus on the developers themselves.

People ask what the secret is to the rapid growth of the Apache APISIX community and open-source commercial company. The contributor-centric funnel is shown below.

This funnel pattern enables us to focus on Apache APISIX contributors and early adopters rather than commercialization and marketing. Furthermore, this bottom-up model also makes it easier to realize commercial conversion.

We also successfully closed the pre-A round financing, for which we sincerely appreciate the trust from Zhencheng and Shunwei Capital.

At the end of 2020, Apache APISIX DevCon 2020 was held. Many speakers from well-known companies, like Tencent Cloud, Shopify, Airwallex, AISpeech, KubeSphere, and Sina Weibo, shared their experience in adopting Apache APISIX in projects and programming development.

The same month, a warm-hearted architect from AWS spontaneously made a video introducing how to build Apache APISIX on AWS on YouTube, attracting more developers and contributors to join the open-source community.

This year, the company has marched into a brand-new phase.

API7.ai finished the A-round and A-plus round financing, thanks to Matrix Partners’ support, following a series of ventures from Shunwei Capital and ZhenFund.

API7.ai kept forward to improve its products. In April, Apache APISIX on the APISEVEN Platform was published officially on AWS Marketplace, introducing the enterprise-ready gateway solution based on Apache APISIX. As a result, the users can process all the traffic requests of API and microservices, saving the cost of operation and maintenance.

At that time, the company members were distributed in ten cities. They were located far apart but worked unified.

The Service Mesh project based on Apache APISIX was open-sourced in May, with better performance, less resource occupation, and lower secondary development and customization cost.

API7.ai was dedicated to making development easier for users. Apache APISIX supported Java for writing plugins, enabling more developers to develop Apache APISIX with their familiar technology stack. Conversely, Apache APISIX supports the development ecosystem by supporting multiple programming languages. Apache APISIX embraced a new milestone: the number of contributors to Apache APISIX’s main repository on GitHub passed 200, reflecting the healthy ecosystem development.

Due to its innovation and contribution to API gateway, API7.ai was selected as one of Tencent’s Top 38 Cloud-Native Accelerator Enterprises among over 500 global enterprise competitors.

Furthermore, Apache APISIX increased the support for writing plugins by WebAssembly and launched the new open-source project “wasm-nginx-module” for more open and active communication. Additionally, Apache APISIX integrated Keycloak and Google Cloud Logging, respectively, for authentication and improving the log process.

Gradually, stable and reliable cooperation was established. For instance, the largest Chinese office software manufacturer, WPS Office, chose Apache APISIX as the API gateway. Currently, Apache APISIX runs on thousands of CPUs in WPS, processing tens of billions of API calls per day, with peak traffic exceeding one million QPS.

API7.ai’s team grew rapidly, expanding to six countries and 20 cities. Many of our teammates are Apache Software Foundation members, OpenResty or NGINX core maintainers, Kubernetes members, and industry experts in cloud infrastructure and security.

Below is a cartoon group photo painted to celebrate API7.ai’s third anniversary. They are a group of open-source lovers.

Since Apache APISIX was open-sourced, API7.ai built its products based on it and kept pace with the development of Apache APISIX. APISIX and API7 solutions are now widely used by hundreds of companies across the internet, financial, blockchain, manufacturing, retailing, and IoT industries, such as vivo, Amber, and Airwallex.

For deeper business exploration, API7.ai released the API7 Cloud in March, committing to unifying the API and microservices management in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

In May, Apache APISIX Summit ASIA 2022 was successfully held. Apache APISIX rapidly grows in the form of a community. Within three years, the global contributors has exceeded 470, achieving a 20-times increase. The overall contributor activity has shown an increasing trend, with the highest number of monthly active contributors approaching 40, which is still increasing organically.

In 2022, the three Developer Advocates for Apache APISIX have presented at over 70 conferences in 22 countries, including the USA, Canada, Portugal, India, the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Bulgaria, and many more. In July 2022, Apache APISIX’s developer advocate, as one of the Apache Software Foundation members, participated in the first big Java and JVM conference in Spain.

In September, API7.ai participated in the Open Source India and Google Cloud Community Day Pune 2022, sharing the latest technologies about API gateway.

Our advocate in Google Cloud Community Day Pune 2022, in India, in September.

Besides, API7.ai was devoted to holding high-quality contributor workshops worldwide. For example, workshops were held at the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Inha University, National Institute of Technology Hamirpur, Comsats University, and University of California, Berkeley, attracting many college students and engineers.

As such a fast-growing company, API7.ai also won many awards.

StackShare, a tech stack intelligence platform, and community resource, selected the “Top 100+ Developer Tools 2021” in March after aggregating usage from over 600,000 tech stacks, over seven million followers, and millions more developer comments, reviews, and votes. Apache APISIX was among them.

At the end of October 2022, API7.ai was chosen as Red Herring Top 100 Global. Red Herring’s Top 100 Global list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising companies and outstanding entrepreneurs. Moreover, API7.ai was recognized as a Representative Vendor in the latest Gartner Market Guide for API Gateways!

API7.ai will keep its mission to serve the world’s API requests and believe that high concurrency, low latency, safety, and reliability will be the basic requirements of all services.