631 karma · joined October 17, 2010
The news here is the AI reading the API docs, assembling requests, and iterating on them until it works as expected.
This sounds simple, but is time consuming and error prone for humans to do.
Nango (YC W23) is an open-source developer infrastructure for product integrations.
We power the integrations of Replit, Semgrep, Motion, Vapi, Exa, and hundreds of other AI companies.
Small but highly experienced team, hard technical challenges (scale + infra devtool running untrusted user code), tons of ownership, direct customer contact, growing very fast.
We are looking for a Staff engineer who can touch every part of the stack and is passionate about dev infrastructure.
Website: https://nango.dev Jobs: https://nango.dev/careers
Especially if you use pipedream for integrations in your agent or product.
(I’m one of the founders)
Nango (YC W23) is an open source product: Developer infrastructure for product integrations.
We power the integrations of Semgrep, Motion, Vapi, Exa, and hundreds of other B2B software.
Small but highly experienced team, hard technical challenges (scale + infra devtool running untrusted user code), tons of ownership, direct customer contact, growing very fast.
We are looking for a Staff engineer that can touch every part of stack and is passionate about dev infrastructure.
Website: https://nango.dev Jobs: https://nango.dev/careers
Examples: - Low latency to show X last emails a person had with a specific email address
- Enriching data from the emails/calendar with other data from your product (E.g. mapping email recipients to contacts)
- Knowing when a calendar event has changed (sometimes also possible with webhooks)
- Detecting deletes (maybe also possible with webhooks, not sure for gmail/calendar)
A lot of teams use us for their Gmail & Google calendar integrations.
If you want to run complex queries across large parts of the data, syncing + indexing on your side will be necessary. Limits on filters, pagination & rate limits make it infeasible to search across most of a user's inbox without tens of seconds to minutes of latency.
But before you sync all the data, I would test if your users actually need to run such queries.
Both Gmail & Google Calendar have a query endpoint that searches across many fields. I would start with a simple tool for your agent to run queries on that, and expand from there if necessary.
Both Nango and Composio could do this for you.
With Nango, you would also get syncs on the same platform, if it turns out you need them.
Hope this helps!
Nango (YC W23) is an open source product: Developer infrastructure for product integrations. We power the integrations of Semgrep, Motion, Vapi, Exa, and hundreds of other B2B software.
Small but highly experienced team, hard technical challenges (scale + infra devtool running untrusted user code), tons of ownership, direct customer contact, growing very fast.
We are looking for a Staff engineer that can touch every part of stack and is passionate about dev infrastructure.
Website: https://nango.dev Jobs: https://nango.dev/careers
Email me on robin @ <domain> and happy to find a solution for your use case
With something like https://nango.dev you can get a single server that covers 400+ APIs.
Also handles auth, observability and offers other interfaces for direct tool calling.
(Full disclosure, I’m the founder)
Free for OAuth with 400+ APIs & can be self-hosted
(I am one of the founders)
Nango is an open-source platform for product integrations with 300+ APIs.
B2B SaaS use us to connect their product with all the other SaaS their customers use. Learn more here: https://www.nango.dev
We are a late-seed stage, YC-backed startup and fully remote (US & EU).
Hiring for fullstack engineering roles (EST timezone) and an entrepreneur in residence (also EST based).
More details: https://www.nango.dev/jobs
Our experience was exactly like OP describes: https://www.nango.dev/blog/why-is-oauth-still-hard
There are also more flexible solutions like https://www.nango.dev
It handles the API-specific complexities (auth, retries, webhooks, per-customer config, pre-built templates) but allows you to implement the exact use case + data model you need.
It's open source/source available.
(disclaimer: I am a founder)
We implemented (O)Auth for 250+ APIs with Nango and wrote about our experience here: https://www.nango.dev/blog/why-is-oauth-still-hard
Can you give a real-life example of a 2-way data sync you or your users have set up?
- A support SaaS uses Nango to sync contacts & companies with CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.)
- A billing SaaS uses Nango to sync invoices, customers, etc. with accounting systems (Quickbooks, Netsuite, etc.)
- A security-focused SaaS uses Nango to create issues in Jira, Linear, etc., and then syncs the status & other properties between these apps and its own product
I hope this helps!
But we want to make it easier for engineers to offer their customers the native integrations they need.
Usually, these cover the most important and most valuable use cases. But they are often also the most complex to build (e.g. reliable 2-way data syncs)
We have heard the opposite argument for AI agents: The people we spoke with want control over what the AI agents can do in the external systems. With direct API access and non-deterministic behavior, how do you guarantee it doesn't swap the POST /contacts with DELETE /contacts?
Integration platforms that abstract the API provide a safety net for this, and auditability.
I think the biggest difference is that Nango lets you customize & extend the unified APIs on the platform.
Usually unified APIs mitigate their limited catalog with passthrough/proxy requests. But this is a partial solution, since you go back to having a lot of integration logic in your code base.
With Nango these customizations live in the unified API itself and benefit from all the infrastructure available there (OAuth, rate-limit handling, pagination, de-duplication of records, etc.). You can also build entirely custom integrations in Nango.
That being said, I think open-source unified APIs have a ton of promise! It is great to see the ecosystem grow :)
Congrats on the milestone & keep on pushing!!
Would love to hear your feedback on the Slack community if you take a look!
This is going after Canva and if it gets bundled into your existing 365 subscription it can be a compelling offer for millions of SMEs and consumers on that stack already (especially if it integrates well with Word/Outlook/etc).
Would be great to hear more about your use case for this, feel free to message me on our community or on robin (at) nango (dot) dev
Yes we are thinking about bringing the proxy back as well. Probably with some added features, such as rate-limit handling and automatic retries (powered by Temporal).
The proxy edge deployment idea is interesting. Would you be calling it directly from your frontend/mobile code? We were thinking most people would want to have the proxy as close to their backend as possible, but maybe we are missing something?