Apigee started in 2004 as Nexgen Machines, became Sonoa Systems that fall, and only took the Apigee name in 2010. By then its business was APIs, the plugs that let one piece of software talk to another. Retailers, banks and phone companies were opening their systems to mobile apps and partners. Apigee sold the gatekeeper: software to publish those APIs, secure them and track who used them. It filed in the spring of 2015, as every big company tried to become a software company.

Chet Kapoor's Pivot

Chet Kapoor joined as CEO in January 2007 after leading content management and search products at IBM. Under him the company turned toward API management. The bet was that APIs would become the main way businesses connected to customers and partners. Each company would need one place to control access, set traffic limits and measure use. Apigee told investors in its prospectus that this market was new and unproven, and it was spending heavily to win it early.

Google Comes Calling

Apigee priced at $17 a share in April 2015 and listed on Nasdaq as APIC. The stock traded below its offer price for much of the next year. In June 2016 its shares closed at $12.62. That September, Google agreed to buy Apigee for $17.40 a share in cash, about $625 million. The deal closed in November 2016, and Apigee became part of Google Cloud, where it still runs under its own name.

Cover: A Gentleman Who Wanted to Study the Habits of Bees too Closely, Honoré-Victorin Daumier. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a gentleman studying bees too closely (Apigee, apis).