Nokiaonce the largest telecommunications company in the world, but now mainly a provider of infrastructure and services to telecommunications carriers, made an acquisition to be a bridge between the worlds of technology and telecommunications. It’s buying Fastformerly known as RapidAPI, a startup that operates an API marketplace. Nokia will integrate Rapid into a platform it is building to help 5G operators open up their networks to more developers.
“Operators need a bridge to connect thousands of developers to drive business and consumer value creation and monetize their networks,” said Raghav Sahgal, president of Cloud and Network Services at Noka. in a statement.
The deal will include a public marketplace, enterprise services and an enterprise-grade API hub designed to build, test and share APIs internally and externally.
The terms of the agreement were not disclosed in the official announcement. Rapid was once valued at $1 billion and had up to 4 million users tapping around 40,000 APIs. The companies have not disclosed Rapid’s active users to date, except to note that it numbers in the thousands, and that the APIs are in the hundreds. Since Nokia is publicly traded, more financial details may come in a future filing.
The tech landscape has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, and many later-stage startups have found it challenging to meet the lofty forecasts they had set while collecting large rounds of funding in stronger years. (Rapid’s $1 billion valuation was based on a funding round from 2022.)
Rapid rose to prominence amid a boom in interest in APIs a decade ago, when APIs were first emerging as the network between a disparate number of apps and other services. Rapid’s pitch was that it would provide a single place to find and use APIs in what appeared to be a very fragmented market.
But it is not clear that Rapid has found a path to profitability in providing this service. The founder of Rapid, Iddo Gino (a prodigy who started the company at the age of 17 in 2015), left his CEO in April 2023, replaced by Marc Friend, and in the following weeks, the startup saw at least two major shifts of dismissals which reduced the workforce by 82% (cue headlines of the company’s “Rapid descent“).
San Francisco-based Rapid had raised nearly $273 million in venture funding from big-name investors that included Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft and SoftBank, among others.
It’s not clear how many people are actually at Rapid as of now, nor how many will join Nokia in the deal. Nokia’s statement emphasizes product over people, noting that it is acquiring “technological assets, including the world’s largest API hub used by thousands of active developers around the world, and its research and development unit highly qualified”.
For Nokia, the acquisition is an interesting and somewhat ironic turn given the history of the Finnish company as a pioneer in the world of mobile phones.
In the 1990s, Nokia set the pace for building mobile networks around the world, and became the world’s No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer. In the 2000s, however, it missed the boat in the switch to smartphones, where Apple and Google (and Samsung and hundreds of others that build on Google’s Android operating system) took charge. Some have argued that one of Nokia’s biggest failures was its inability to build an extensible ecosystem for apps and third parties to build for its smartphones. So it is interesting that it is now positioning itself as an enabler for that very purpose.
In particular, Nokia sees an opportunity for carriers to encourage further development on their 5G networks, now built but in many cases underutilized. Carriers, they say, want more third parties building applications and other services on these networks, and have launched a new “Network as Code” platform for that purpose. Rapid’s API framework will exist as part of that initiative. Nokia said carriers and other service providers signed up to the platform include BT, DISH, Google Cloud, Infobip, Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Argentina, as well as 20 others.
“We are pleased to join forces with Nokia,” said Friend, CEO of Rapid, in a statement. “Combining Rapid’s API technology and R&D expertise with Nokia’s scale and network and API domain expertise will enable us to expand the broader API ecosystem.”