Inigo announced $4.5 million in seed funding from Engineering Capital, Hetz Ventures, and NextGen Venture Partners. Inigo will use the funding to scale engineering and go-to-market initiatives as it executes its mission of empowering API and platform teams to fully control, manage, and secure their GraphQL deployments.

GraphQL APIs offer far superior flexibility, scalability, and ease of use compared to legacy REST APIs, fueling the open source API query language's rapid and accelerating developer-led adoption. GraphQL's popularity is also now driving its second phase of adoption-the enterprise. Gartner predicts that more than half of enterprises will use GraphQL in production by 2025 (up from fewer than 10% in 2021), necessitating the need for enterprise-grade GraphQL tools.

However, for all the efficiency gains that GraphQL offers organizations, it also presents new challenges. More than 50% of APIs in use today are unmanaged or "shadow" APIs, which are undiscovered or invisible to the platform teams responsible for optimizing the schema and ensuring that API development is efficient and secure. Implementing efficient cross-organization business logic, enforcing standards across subgraphs, and managing resource usage all require visibility beyond what traditional API gateways and/or edge gateways offer today. These inefficiencies result in slower and more expensive software development cycles, API latency increases, and degradated service levels and user experiences. Shadow APIs also pose new security challenges, as they create a fertile ground for new application-level attacks and break existing access control policies. Traditional API and web application gateways cannot discover or visualize GraphQL traffic-let alone protect it in real-time-as they see all GraphQL traffic as single obscure calls.

Inigo was founded to provide API and platform teams with the exact visibility and tools required to achieve complete and continuous GraphQL API management, governance, and real-time security. Inigo's GraphQL gateway equips teams with schema-based access control to define and enforce security policies, restricting access to API-exposed data and functionality to only authorized users and applications. Inigo provides security and compliance via a full audit trail for tracking and monitoring all GraphQL-API-related interactions, and PII detection for recognizing and preventing attempts to breach sensitive personal data. Inigo further guards against attacks leveraging spec abuse, injections, and object-level rate limiting, preventing and mitigating query overloads, data breaches, and service disruptions. Inigo's GraphQL API Gateway is SOC-2-compliant.

"Organizations are eager to make the shift to GraphQL APIs," said Shahar Binyamin, CEO and co-founder, Inigo. "However, it's crucial that API and platform teams resist relying on traditional security tooling that leaves them blind and vulnerable to GraphQL API attackers. As a dedicated GraphQL API management, governance, and security solution, Inigo uniquely empowers teams to scale their API modernization initiatives healthily from the start. Ideally implementing Inigo from the beginning of their GraphQL adoption, teams can quickly start to reap the many benefits of GraphQL APIs while eliminating any window of increased risk. We're excited to continue to build the Inigo platform backed by our seed investors."

"GraphQL is a significant API modernization opportunity that an increasing number of enterprises are capitalizing on," said Ben Bayat, Managing Partner and NextGen Venture Partners. "This rapid growth in GraphQL adoption presents a direct market need for technology capable of delivering trustworthy GraphQL API security, governance, and management, as well as API performance and developer experience enhancements. Inigo offers the exact dedicated and comprehensive solution for ensuring that enterprises can seamlessly and securely complete their GraphQL transformations and achieve their API development goals at scale."

Inigo complements its security features with key developer experience enhancements and workflow efficiencies. Inigo's operations and performance optimization features enable developers to track and improve GraphQL API performance in real time. Developers also gain CI tools for API lifecycle management, enabling automated API testing and deployment. Inigo's schema planning enables developers to pursue modular and extensible GraphQL API design and implementations. Additionally, Inigo provides developers with granular query subgraph analytics to continuously understand, optimize, and evolve their GraphQL APIs' usage and behavior.