Google announced that it’s planning to buy Apigee, an API management company, for US$17.40 per share in cash, which totals approximately $625 million.
According to Business Insider, Apigee was valued at $600 million in the summer of 2014, then lowered to $494.5 million when it held its IPO in 2015. In March of this year, Apigee was trading at $7.75 per share, below half of its IPO price, according to Business Insider. The company’s stock has rebounded as of this month, however.
APIs serve an important role in today’s digital transformation, especially since they are what allow a company’s back-end services to talk to mobile and web-based apps. Apigee enables this by providing an API platform that supports secure and stable analytics capabilities.
“We’re excited about adding Apigee to Google,” said Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s cloud businesses. “Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits, and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs.”
Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, said his company is also excited about the agreement. Over the years, the work that Apigee has done with partners, customers and developers has helped the company understand the API needs of today, he said.
“We’ve entered a new era of cloud computing, where enterprises are increasingly running business-critical applications in the cloud, and across multiple clouds,” said Kapoor. “Google is the open cloud provider committed to delivering new software for not only hybrid-cloud environments, but also for the multi-cloud world.”
APIs are “vital” for how businesses operate in today’s digital and fast-paced mobile marketplace, said Greene. She also added that APIs are the hubs for companies and partners to interact, whether it’s a business applying for a loan or a sales system sending warranty information to the manufacturer.
Right now, Apigee is used by companies like AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, First Data, Live Nation and Walgreens. aWhere, a Big Data company that specializes in weather and agronomic information for farmers, commercial growers and policy makers, also partnered with Apigee in April. With Apigee, the company was able to provide an API layer on top of its data to customers and software companies so they could better understand the agribusiness and challenges that might exist today for farmers.
Apigee’s API solution added to the Google cloud will accelerate customers’ move to supporting businesses with digital interactions, said Greene, and Apigee will make it easy to “accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high-quality digital interactions.”
“Google cloud customers are already benefitting from no sys-ops dev environments, including Google App Engine and Google Container Engine,” said Greene. “Now, with Apigee’s API-management platform, they’ll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.”
