Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we ask startups about the problems they’re solving, the apps they’re building and the lessons they’ve learned during their startup journey. In this edition, we’ll learn why Terence Bennett, CEO of DreamFactory, and his team are championing a new way to think about API integrations.
What was the genesis of DreamFactory?
DreamFactory was originally built to rapidly and securely connect databases to internal applications. DreamFactory began with a question: Why isn’t there a Ruby on Rails equivalent for APIs? Our exploration into existing API management solutions revealed a significant gap — no one offered the capability to generate new RESTful APIs from scratch.
Most of our great ideas have come straight from the mouth of our biggest champions, and it motivates us every day to keep building and improving. So we listened to our customers and discovered a diverse set of use cases, including using DreamFactory as a secure data access layer in front of Snowflake. DreamFactory puts a RESTful endpoint in front of any Snowflake table, view, or stored procedure thus automating the building, securing and documenting of internal or partner REST APIs. We then wrap each API in enterprise security such as API management, RBAC, rate limiting and authentication. In partnership with Snowflake, customers can now do this in Snowpark Container Services.
Our largest customers are running all their data products on top of DreamFactory APIs, which are serving data directly out of Snowflake. It’s a powerful, secure and effective way to rapidly prototype, deploy and scale JSON-payload REST APIs into any environment.
What drew you to APIs in particular?
APIs are mission-critical integrations that power much of the internet and internal business processes. Today, APIs consume a large part of any development team’s time, are inherently error-prone when developed from scratch, and easily fall out of sync with current documentation. Automating these integrations significantly streamlines and secures them, allowing teams to work on higher-priority projects.
How does Snowflake help you address API automation challenges?
Snowflake abstracts away much of the complexity of working and building applications with data, while DreamFactory abstracts away the complexity of building data APIs, both for ingestion and extraction. We neatly complement Snowflake’s data mobilization and consolidation strengths. It’s one of the reasons this partnership is such a good fit.
Partnering allows us to deliver a seamless, end-to-end solution for secure data access and integration. DreamFactory can assist nearly any digital organization, but larger customers will recognize real value because they have larger data sets and more complex architectures that require more APIs. Rapid prototyping and deployment of API integrations can accelerate their innovation and growth, which drives more value from Snowflake and its ecosystem.
On our side, working with customers within Snowflake’s environment streamlines and simplifies our entire sales and deployment process. This allows us to deliver value to customers even faster, which benefits everyone. It’s a win-win-win.
For example, DreamFactory serves as the Snowflake secure data access layer for one of the world’s largest energy companies. Our software sits within their environment (as opposed to in Snowflake) and directly serves Snowflake “gold datasets” across their entire enterprise environment, thus powering innovation, growth and meaningful change.
How has the Snowflake Native App Framework shaped your startup’s growth and development strategy?
Building on the Snowflake Native App Framework helps us reach customers where they are and where their data is. As a self-hosted (on premises) application, our greatest challenge is getting configured and set up within a customer’s environment. The Snowflake Native App Framework completely solves this problem. DreamFactory will deploy with one click from within Snowflake Marketplace. That is game-changing for us!
As an innovator, what do you think about the rapidly changing AI landscape?
I oscillate between sheer excitement and awe. Every week, we see new and exciting developments. The industry is moving so fast, and it’s hard to imagine what we might see next year, not to mention a few years from now.
I am most excited about how AI is going to help us solve complex and intractable problems. It further democratizes knowledge and the use of deeply technical tools. This means more people will have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation and build things to solve the problems of the world.
How has AI impacted what you’re doing at DreamFactory?
We use AI every day internally at DreamFactory, and we are seeing more AI use cases since APIs are at the heart of this AI revolution. As companies start to think through how to train AI models with this data, they are faced with a daunting question of how much of their internal data they want to expose. DreamFactory makes it incredibly easy to only expose specific tables or rows to a model, since you can just generate an API on that specific data set and get to work connecting it. This allows organizations to be prescriptive and specific about how they expose internal data sets.
What’s next for DreamFactory?
DreamFactory is mapping out a new software category called API Generation. There are already a few players in this space, but no one has really defined it yet. API Generation is perfectly placed between the rise of automation tools; the need for more secure developer tools; and the rapid proliferation of APIs. The use of API Generation for automating the overall creation, standardization, security and documentation for all internal data-source APIs is a no-brainer. We are hyper-focused on helping explain the value of API Generation to the developer community, and Snowflake is proving to be an invaluable partner in that journey.
Learn more about DreamFactory and API Generation at dreamfactory.com. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program for info on how Snowflake can support your startup goals.
