Fern, a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies deliver SDKs and API documentation, has raised $9 million in a Series A funding.
Ever since they launched in 2023, they have worked with over 150 customers including industry leaders like Square, Webflow, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, and Intercom. This funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, bringing the total funding to $13 million.
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“The explosion of AI-driven developer tools has created an urgent need for faster, frictionless integration. By eliminating friction from the developer experience and managing the gritty engineering work that is building and maintaining SDKs and docs, Fern has established itself as a trusted enterprise partner,” Lindsey Li, vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners said in a company statement.
Fern was co-founded by Danny Sheridan, who was also the founder of Woodside distributors, and Wolverine Blockchain, and Deep Singhvi, who worked at Woodside Distributors and Palantir Technologies previously. The company believes that APIs underpin the internet but are still painful to work with. They are often untyped, unstandardized, and out-of-sync across multiple sources of truth, and so Fern attempts to find a solution to that.
Primary investor Bessemer Venture Partners took to LinkedIn to share the story behind Fern. The co-founders first met at the University of Michigan in 2015. After gaining experience at Amazon and Palantir, they became familiar with internal SDK code generation tools such as Smithy and Conjure — systems that allowed large tech firms to efficiently produce client and server bindings in multiple languages, including Python, TypeScript, and Java.
However, for most companies, building and maintaining such infrastructure is not feasible. As a result, many turn to open-source SDK generators, which can be inconsistent in quality, lack support for essential features like OAuth 2.0 and server-sent events, and often require manual intervention after code is generated. Fern aims to close that gap by offering a more reliable, automated solution for modern API development.
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According to Fern, SDKs and DOCs are better together. By powering both the SDK Generation and the API Documentation, Fern has been created to be uniquely positioned to deliver a unified developer experience. The Fern SDK Generator allows companies to automate the tedious work of building and maintaining SDKs in all popular languages.
Fern is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, and consists of a small and mighty team of less than 20 building open-source developer tools.