Nokia acquires Rapid, the API company once valued at $1B
Nokia, once the world’s biggest mobile phone company but now mainly a provider of infrastructure and services to telecoms carriers, has made an acquisition in its bid to be a bridge between the worlds of tech and telecoms. It’s acquiring Rapid, formerly known as RapidAPI, a startup that operates an API marketplace. Nokia will be integrating Rapid into a platform it’s building to help 5G operators open their networks to more developers.
“Operators need a bridge to connect to thousands of developers to drive enterprise 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 for building, testing, and sharing APIs internally and externally.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed in the official announcement. Rapid was once valued at $1 billion and counted as many as 4 million users tapping into some 40,000 APIs. The companies are not disclosing Rapid’s active users as of today except to note that it is a number in the thousands, and that APIs are in the hundreds. As Nokia is publicly traded, more financial details may come through in a future filing.
The landscape for technology has shifted drastically over the last couple of years, and many later-stage startups have found it challenging to meet the lofty forecasts they had set while raising big funding rounds in more buoyant years. (Rapid’s $1 billion valuation was based on a funding round from 2022.)
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