Travel Startups Incubator (TSI) is pleased to announce Yappes as its newest portfolio company. Yappes is an online marketplace for companies to discover, compare and license travel technology APIs. Yappes provides an open platform where travel API’s can be published, sand boxed, and tested.

Yappes aims to be a highly transparent and efficient API delivery & governance platform for both API providers and API consumers. Policies can be applied to streamline deal negotiations and licensing. Yappes is specifically designed for the travel domain in order to help users fulfill their needs in a familiar, innovative and efficient way.

Yappes as an API Marketplace offers several benefits and value to both API providers and API consumers.

  • Increased exposure to markets resulting in increased visibility, transactions and revenues.
  • LDN (Licensing, Deal and Negotiation) policies attached with each API provides streamlined and efficient deal negotiation process.
  • Orchestrating the API’s access centrally to offer high transparency and governance.
  • Enhanced API discovery using domain based Micro Classification and Contextual recommendations.
  • Enabling better business decisions by providing insights on usage, geographical trends, API progression and several other parameters which are derived through Travel trends and API analytics.

According to Yappes Co-founder and CEO Bhanu Kumar Jain (BK), there is currently a huge gap in the travel industry that makes it very difficult to discover all available travel-related platforms. “When it comes to API licensing and deal negotiations,” BK says, “alot of innovations and improvements are needed in terms of policies and processes. Yappes is designed to bridge this gap by providing an efficient method for distributing travel APIs and managing their policies.”

As BK puts it, Yappes’s flexible distribution channel allows users to publish or consume APIs and easily engage in licensing and deal negotiations through a customized yet automated process. Other features include API collection management services and the micro classification of on-boarded APIs.

Co-founder and CTO Rajagopal Somasundaram (Raj) states that the Yappes vision is to become “the largest aggregator of travel-related APIs.”

“We realize the potential of this idea to translate into a game changer for the way travel-related APIs are going to be transacted globally,” he says.

“The API trend is exponentially increasing,” Raj adds. “In the future, API adaptation will become a necessity more than a value-added service.”

BK explains that when he and Raj analyzed various data points with respect to the API industry in the travel domain, they discovered that many travel service and content providers adopt API strategies to generate additional revenue streams, boost their presence in the marketplace, or both.

“This has led to the billions of API transactions done each day,” he notes, “and accounts for 40-60% of these businesses’ revenue generation.”

According to Matt Zito, Managing Partner at Travel Startups Incubator, “One and a half years ago we wrote about an idea we had for the travel industry to build an open API marketplace. Today we are excited to say we are backing that fundamental idea through our newest portfolio company Yappes. These guys have gone beyond our original idea and uncovered a much bigger opportunity. The travel industry in the next 2-years will see unprecedented collaboration, shared innovations and new alliances. Yappes encompasses all three initiatives as they work on building a new type of distribution platform for the travel industry.”