Nokiaonce the world’s largest mobile phone company, but now primarily a provider of infrastructure and services to telecom operators, has made an acquisition in its bid to bridge the gap between the tech and telecom worlds. It is acquired Rapidformerly known as RapidAPI, a startup operating an API marketplace. Nokia will integrate Rapid into a platform it is building to help 5G operators open up their networks to more developers.

“Operators need a bridge to connect to thousands of developers to drive value creation for enterprises and consumers and monetize their networks,” Raghav Sahgal, president of Cloud and Network Services at Noka, said 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.

The terms of the agreement are not disclosed in official announcement. Rapid was once valued at $1 billion and had up to 4 million users accessing around 40,000 APIs. The companies don’t disclose Rapid’s active users today, except to say it’s in the thousands and the APIs are in the hundreds. As Nokia is publicly traded, more financial details may appear in a future document.

The tech landscape has changed drastically over the past few years, and many later-stage startups are finding it difficult to meet the lofty expectations they set while raising large rounds of funding in more buoyant years. (Rapid’s $1 billion valuation was based on a 2022 funding round.)

Rapid rose to prominence amid a boom in interest in APIs a decade ago, when APIs first emerged as a link between a disparate number of applications and other services. Rapid’s pitch was that it provided a single place to find and use APIs in what appeared to be a very fragmented market.

But it’s not clear that Rapid has found a path to profitability in providing this service. Rapid founder Iddo Gino (a madman who started the company at just 17 in 2015) stepped down as CEO in April 2023, replaced by Marc Friend, and in the following weeks the startup saw at least two major rounds of DISMISSAL which reduced the number of employees by 82% (company headlines “Rapid descent“).

San Francisco-based Rapid has raised nearly $273 million in venture funding from big-name investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft and SoftBank, among others.

It’s not clear how many people are actually at Rapid now, nor how many would join Nokia in the deal. Nokia’s statement emphasizes the product more than the people, noting that it is acquiring “technology assets, including the world’s largest API hub used by thousands of active developers globally and its highly skilled research and development facility.”

For Nokia, the acquisition is an interesting and slightly ironic twist given the Finnish company’s history as a pioneer in the mobile world.

In the 1990s, Nokia set the pace for building mobile networks around the world and became the number one manufacturer of mobile phones in the world. In the 2000s, however, it missed the boat in the move to smartphones, where Apple and Google (and Samsung and hundreds of others that rely on Google’s Android operating system) took over. Some have argued that one of Nokia’s biggest weaknesses has been its inability to build an extensible ecosystem for apps and third parties to build for its smartphones. So it is interesting that it is now positioning itself as an enabler for this very purpose.

Specifically, Nokia sees an opportunity for operators to encourage more development in their 5G networks, now built but in many cases underutilized. The carriers, they say, want more third parties to build apps and other services on those networks, and have launched a new “Network as Code” platform to that end. Rapid’s API framework will exist as part of this initiative. Nokia said carriers and other service providers signed up to the platform include BT, DISH, Google Cloud, Infobip, Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Argentina and 20 others.

“We are delighted to join forces with Nokia,” Friend, Rapid’s CEO, said in a statement. “The combination of API Rapid’s technology and R&D expertise with Nokia’s scale and network and API expertise will allow us to scale the API more broadly. ecosystem.”