The following interview is a conversation we had with Darko Vukovic, CEO & Founder of PolyAPI, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $5 Million Raised to Transform Enterprise Middleware Through Native Code Development
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Darko Vukovic, CEO and Founder of PolyAPI, a modern enterprise middleware platform that’s raised over 5 million funding. Darko, how are you?
Darko Vukovic
I’m doing well. Thank you, Brett, for having me.
Brett
No problem. Super excited to have you here. Let’s talk about what you’re building. So what does Poly API do outside of that very brief intro I did of you being a modern enterprise middleware platform?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, so we help enterprises build connectivity, so that could take different shapes. It could be horizontal integrations between systems where you’re automating workflows or synchronizing data, but it could also be vertical integration where you’re building new APIs and endpoints to help your consumers and partners connect with your systems.
Brett
Take us back to the founding of the company. This doesn’t seem like something that you just like, randomly come up with, you know, what were you doing in your life prior to this that put you in a position to even observe that this was a company and a product worth building?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah. So before starting PolyAPI, I’ve spent 12 years in this space. So I worked at Mulesoft, at Oracle, at Google, apigee, all in the domain of building integration platforms, API management platforms, and always focused on enterprises.
Brett
What was that like when you started to transition out of these kind of larger startups, these bigger companies, and then move into founding your own company? What was like, the most difficult part of making that transition?
Darko Vukovic
I would say the most difficult part was finding an idea with enough conviction that you think it’s going to be a game changer. So as I’ve worked at these big companies, many times I had smaller ideas or side projects and things like that, but never really anything that I was convicted enough to justify basically making a big transition. I worked at another startup between PolyAPI and my time at Google, and that helped because it was a lot easier to go from a startup of 20 people down to being a Founder than is it would be to jump straight from a big company into becoming a Founder. So my advice to potential founders or people that are interested in this is get in the game, get into startups.
Darko Vukovic
It’s okay if you spend a couple years working at another startup before you take that leap, because psychologically, it’s just going to be a lot easier than when you’re, you know, at a big enterprise with a cushy job, with benefits and everything in place.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense because I’ve spoken with a lot of founders who, you know, went the other path of like, you go from 10 years at Google to starting your own company, and they say that’s a massive shift and a lot of pain comes with making that transition. So it makes sense to have kind of a buffer period there where you go to a startup in between founding your own company.
Darko Vukovic
Absolutely. And it doesn’t even have to be exactly in the same domain, but I definitely would advise people to build up a lot of experience in a domain before starting your own company in that domain. The reason being is you don’t realize how much having connections and people you can potentially recruit, people you can potentially partner with, people that can be advisors, people that could be scouts for you. So there’s a lot of benefits, both on the people side and the knowledge side. And you know, you’re going to suffer from the imposter syndrome a lot whether you have a ton of experience or not.
Darko Vukovic
And so I could just imagine that if you don’t have a ton of deep experience in a specific domain, that’s going to come to haunt you even more so, and it’s going to be hard to know when you’re onto something and when you’re potentially way off track.
Brett
Let’s go back a bit to the founding story there and specifically the early days. So you have the idea, you know, what happens next. What do those first three to six months look like?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, the first. At some point you have to make it official. Right. And so in our case, it was myself and two friends of mine, and we basically met up in a neutral town that was nobody’s hometown, and we spent a day and a half together basically brainstorming idea, creating a game plan, trying to formulate what the genesis of the company would be, what the key focus areas would be. And I think all of that is great. But when you start writing code, you know, in the case of our technology, it’s a software application, so you start writing code, and that’s kind of the official, quote unquote, building of the product. At that point, it gets Real.
Darko Vukovic
When you start having to pay people to work for you and you start to see money flowing out of the company, it kind of transitions from this hobby or side project to into something more tangible. At that point, you start focusing on what you really want to build and you start focusing on who you’re going to present it to. And it’s still super early, but I would say that transition, easing into it is key, but also being ready to go hard right out of the gate is important. And I’d say no better way to kind of kickstart it off than to start spending money on it.
Brett
What did it look like in terms of marketing as you began here and then how have you seen the marketing strategy and the approach to marketing really evolve since founding the company?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, so it’s absolutely important to start marketing, but don’t think of it in mass. Right. The key, I think, to our success thus far has been that we always started off with kind of grassroots, one one. At first it was soliciting feedback on the idea and then it transitioned into soliciting people that might be interested in trying the product and actually being alpha testers. And from alpha testers it transitioned into beta testers. And this is happening over the course of months. Right. So this is like we’re six months in and we’re still doing one one calls. And that’s the marketing strategy of reaching people. At some point you become proud of what you’re doing, so you start publishing demos and videos. And we always believed in being a hundred percent transparent.
Darko Vukovic
We think that our domain and our product set is just so hard to like, copy and replicate. So were never worried about competitors catching wind of what we’re doing or somebody, you know, taking our idea and running with it or anything. So were really just always publishing everything we’re doing, you know, to a pretty high degree of detail without giving away the magic sauce. And so marketing naturally evolved to being kind of a content presence online, predominantly LinkedIn, but other social channels as well. Of course we set up a website and we get a healthy amount of traffic there too. But really the philosophy behind the marketing was to build credibility in the early days to prove that there’s something real there.
Darko Vukovic
I think one of the things that enterprise buyers struggle with is that a lot of small startups are vaporware, kind of looking for somebody who’s interested with the idea that, hey, we’ll just build it just in time for them. But these buyers are savvy, they could see right through that. They know you can’t deliver a product in time that they’ll need it. They know there’s a ton of other stuff that comes along with it, like, you know, SOC2 compliance and security and, you know, making sure you support federation with identity platforms and just a ton of stuff that they know they would need to be able to truly use your product. And they just don’t have the time to go out there and entertain ideas that aren’t realistic.
Darko Vukovic
So I would say the content marketing strategy in the early days was to build proof that there is a real product there and then to build the ability to reference people to your content, to your site. Anytime something came up in a conversation, if you said, yeah, we absolutely can do that, what I’ll do is I’ll send you a link to a demo and they click on that demo and it’s a 60 minute demo walking in excruciating detail what that specific thing is. That’s just a way to build confidence and to build trust. So then over time, as you take your product to production, as we did, you start to kind of want to reach more people. And that’s where brand and marketing and messaging, all these things come into play because they all have to be synchronized and lined up.
Darko Vukovic
And at that point you could start to really do cross pollination with podcasts and other channels and means and basically try to make a presence online. But still, even to this day, where we are at, Brett, is it’s still largely almost a documentation exercise of what we’re doing and making that available so that people can learn on our platform if they would like to. It’s still not a marketing machine that drives traffic or people or potential buyers to our site.
Brett
When you think about marketing and growth objectives for 2025, what do you have top of mind right now? What are you thinking? What’s going to be the focus?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah. So we’re still at the stage where we’re getting our second cohort of customers to production. So we’re still in the law of small numbers, right? We’ve got approximately 10 customers in production at this moment, and we’re looking to take that up to 25 or 30 in the next wave. What that means is still very much one one support for the customers. It’s still a matter of identifying visionaries and early adopters because our product is still not suitable for the kind of mass market. So really the game we’re playing is through referrals, through presence at conferences, through grassroots means. How can we reach those people that are the right audience for us at the stage that we’re at as a company? And so really it’s a matter of building pipeline is the terminology.
Darko Vukovic
But what that really means is building relationships with visionaries and early adopters and helping them understand why we’re better positioned to solve their problems and why our product is a phenomenal solution for them, given their situation. And that’s still a very much grassroots, one one type of exercise at this stage.
Brett
What about the market category? Is the market category that people are buying and folks are buying? Is it enterprise middleware? Is that the category?
Darko Vukovic
No. So we’re actually a category maker in this situation. And one thing we struggle with is there are already two defined strategies or two defined categories where one of them is called enterprise integration platforms as a service. But they’ve been largely branded as being low code, no code, drag and drop, you know, super easy. You just grab a couple of connectors, you draw a couple lines between them, and voila, you have your integration. But the reality is that’s just not how enterprise integrations work. There are potentially a lot of simple integrations that you could address with that. But the big ones, the hairy ones, the stuff that carries millions if not billions of transactions, that stuff needs to be built much more robust way.
Darko Vukovic
So typically what companies are doing there is they’re actually building out their own integration platforms and they’re using functions as a service and kubernetes and services like that from the major cloud providers. And so the functions or the serverless function space and the app development space is its own other category. And what we’re really doing is we’re solving the problem that typically would be labeled as integration platforms as a service, but we’re using an approach that would be typically labeled as application development as a category. And so we’re trying to see, and we’ve done a ton of briefings with analysts and they’re kind of scratching their heads too, trying to figure out what the right label for this is. And we’re not going to try and force the creation of that category, we’re just going to let the market do that for us.
Darko Vukovic
But the reason went with middleware is because it’s a little bit looser, a little bit more broad. It allows us to elicit the right idea in the market’s mind without kind of biasing them towards a specific approach or experience that they might be used to. So we’ll see how that shakes out. But at this point, we’re confident calling ourselves middleware and then letting the market kind of create a category for us that’s much more specialized or nuanced to what we do when we reflect on.
Brett
This journey so far. What would you say has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made? And take us behind the scenes? How’d you make that decision?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, I would say the number one decision around go to market has actually manifested from a decision we made about the technology. So technologically we decided early on that the approach to building integrations, orchestrations and microservices with PolyAPI would be done using native code development. What that means is that you can use native languages such as TypeScript, Python, Java, C Sharp to actually write the integration logic. And what that means is that you get the full power of all those languages, their respective communities, the libraries, the runtimes, and the cloud infrastructure that’s been set up for application development in general. And you get to direct that and apply it towards enterprise middleware development.
Darko Vukovic
What that’s done is it’s kind of manifested as a niche player, as somebody that’s uniquely positioned to basically capture the market of companies that have looked at these integration vendors and decided that the custom language, the custom id, the custom runtime, the limitations of domain specific languages is not a decision that they want to take, and it’s not an architecture they want to adopt. So what they’re left with is fending for themselves and effectively creating their own polys to some degree. Internally, I’ve met with companies that have teams that are dedicated to building both the platform and then other teams dedicated to using that platform. And it is a big switching cost, and it is. There’s a big decision that a CTO would have to make to kind of go away from what they built in house to using a vendor product.
Darko Vukovic
But it is a whole market that’s wide open for us. And so in terms of kind of go to market positioning, I would say our ability to cater to that unmet need has been probably the best decision we’ve made. And that’s the one that easily allows us to set ourselves apart from the general market and approach these customers.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about money now. So as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 5 million to date. What have you learned throughout this journey?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, I’ve learned that fundraising takes a lot more time and energy than you would think. I’ve also learned that it’s an ongoing process. It’s not like there is this open season where you go out and you speak to VCs and then you fundraise and you’re done. It’s a constant relationship building exercise. And I think to do it right, you have to constantly have a pulse on investors. What matters to them, what they’re looking for, what gets them excited. And you can actually learn a lot about your market from your investors as well and really from understanding what they’re looking for in your market to understand that you are a good bet. So I would say my advice to founders is that, number one, make sure you find people who understand what you’re doing.
Darko Vukovic
Well, we were fortunate enough that were invested in by Ross Mason at Dig Ventures. And Ross Mason was the Founder of Mulesoft. And mulesoft is arguably the largest player in the domain that we’re in. And so in these super early days, you know, before our pre seed, we’ve had maybe 20 conversations with VCs, and 19 of them decided to pass. And, you know, Ross was eager to jump in. And that kind of a signal is really important because the one person who deeply understands the space was super excited to invest, and the other 19 that peripherally or not at all understand the space didn’t. And so I kind of think back to the super early days and I think back to, gosh, what would it have looked like if we didn’t engage with Ross and we didn’t do that?
Darko Vukovic
We might have been in a position where we felt that, God, 19 out of 19 people passed on this. Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe it isn’t something worth doing. So I would say to very early founders, don’t get discouraged by VCs who pass on you. That just means that you haven’t formulated what you’re saying very well. And it also means that you’re potentially talking to people who don’t understand what you’re doing and you know, are just risk averse enough that they don’t want to speculate on you. So definitely make sure you find investors who understand what you’re doing. And over time, make sure you’re constantly nurturing relationships. Make sure you’re constantly understanding what gets you to the next round. For us, for example, we’re just maybe six months past the latest fundraising, but we’re already thinking about our Series A.
Darko Vukovic
We already have clear metrics on what we want to hit. We have a clear line of sight on how to hit those metrics. And we’re making sure that the 20 or so VCs we’re constantly in communication with understand that. And so we want to set up a situation that when you go into a fundraising situation, you are confident that you’ve hit the metrics to go into it. You create a sense of FOMO with the investors and you say, hey, listen, like we’re ready to do this round. Here are the valuations we’re targeting, here’s how much we want to raise, here’s why we’re confident, here’s how we’re going to apply that capital. And by the way, it’s okay if you guys don’t want to invest.
Darko Vukovic
Like, we’ve got a list of people to go through and we’re just engaging you first because we enjoyed our conversation with you. That coupled with having plenty of Runway and plenty of Runway, being 24 months or, you know, hopefully even more than that, gives you the ability to engage that conversation with confidence because you’re not afraid of getting a no out of them. So I’d say having really strong numbers and having a lot of Runway and then fundraising when you don’t really need the money, but you could use the money to scale faster is probably the best setup there.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like that you’re building?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, if you look five years out, we want to be the de facto or go to approach and platform for enterprises to build their own services and in house applications and connectivity with their customers and their partners. We believe we can do this by offering some capabilities that in the past would have been inconceivable or unimaginable. They would have sounded like something from sci Fi movies. So number one, we want to be the biggest and most accurate catalog of APIs in the world. What that means is that when you go to Start building these integrations. You should have the information you need about the systems that you’re going to work without having to go search the Internet to find them. It should be right at your fingertips, both in visual and textual form.
Darko Vukovic
Additionally, we want to make it super easy for that information to stay up to date, but also to be customized to your enterprise. So for example, you know, many customers use Salesforce as a CRM, but every customer, Salesforce CRM is going to be different in the sense that the objects that they have in those CRMs are going to have custom attributes and there’s going to be custom objects. What that means is that when you hit the same API, you get different data back because enterprises have customized their the schemas of that data. So what we want to create is a system that allows you to basically very easily adapt your schemas into your catalog so that you have the information not just about the API, but the information about your enterprise’s API.
Darko Vukovic
The way this happened is would be by looking at runtime traffic and immediately modifying those models to be accurate and up to the minute. And with that underlying information, we want to give you an experience that then allows AI to use that information to solve whatever problem you’re shooting for. So we see a world where you can prompt the AI and say, hey, I’m trying to build an API, it’s for a partner. I just want to expose the following data and I think you actually talk to the computer. I think there’s already great voice models that can do this. GitHub copilot chat has proven this.
Darko Vukovic
So you talk to your AI assistant, you tell them what you want to do and on your screen is a built out version of what that thing looks like and it’s pre configured and pre wired so that you as a developer take the role, more so of a reviewer, a curator. And you don’t have to sit there and type out a bunch of boilerplate stuff like the AI’s job should be to do that. You should be the mind that guides these AI models in how to do that. And we also want to give you an infrastructure that basically kind of sandboxes that AI to say, hey, use this framework, use this approach. Here’s how you expose an API, here’s how you secure it.
Darko Vukovic
You want to give it a systematic management of it, and then beyond that, you want to see in real time how it’s performing. So we think that there’s a ton of opportunity to use kind of old school textbook approaches to dashboarding and analytics to present that data, but then have a layer on top of it of AI that allows you to focus your energy and attention to the parts that are interesting or critical. That could be new signups, or that could be somebody struggling with the usage of an API. That could be somebody doing a new use case that you never conceived somebody would do with your API.
Darko Vukovic
And beyond that, if you and your partners or your company trusts this system enough to make your source code available to it, you can imagine use cases like an underlying API changing and that having an implication on consumers of that API such that the AI can actually say, hang on a second, this change in the API is going to impact these following functions. Let’s say it’s a breaking change and now you have a type safety issue where you’re assuming that some data is going to come back that’s not. And you can actually have it prescribe the changes that you can take as a developer and you can proactively bring that to developer’s attention and say due to this recent change, your code will be impacted. Here’s the impact, here’s the proposed change.
Darko Vukovic
Do you want to take that and apply it to production right away? So that level of sophistication is again, would have been viewed as sci fi, but we just want to make it so that enterprises can build integrations that are very complicated, very robust, and yet, you know, help those developers scale, you know, 10 to 20x compared to what they’re able to accomplish in their time today.
Brett
Amazing. Love it.
Darko Vukovic
We are going to wrap here.
Brett
Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should we send them?
Darko Vukovic
Yeah, I’d say polyapi.io is probably, you know, where you’re going to see the most information about us and then follow us on LinkedIn. That’s where we’re most active and we post. We also do have a Discord account X Facebook and other places, but up to this point those have been kind of more so just multiplicative effects. The real conversations are happening on LinkedIn for us.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you again for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Darko Vukovic
Thank you, Brett. Have a great day.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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