Finovate and FinDEVr alums Braintree, Finicity and Twilio won recognition at the API World Awards sponsored by API World 2016. Braintree earned the top spot in the Payment APIs category for its payments-platform technology, and Finicity won first place in the Finance APIs category for its Financial Data API with TxPUSH. Twilio was the top recipient of votes in the Communication APIs category. The three companies were among 18 startups competing in more than 30 API categories ranging from API Infrastructure and API Security to Enterprise APIs and Internet of Things APIs.

The jury of six featured Michael Ludden, product manager, developer relations for IBM Watson; John Musser, founder and CEO of API Science; Neha Sampat, CEO of Built.io; Michael Stowe, developer relations manager for MuleSoft; Steven Willmott, CEO of 3scale; and Rob Zazueta, director of digital strategy, TIBCO Software.

Braintree’s payment platform serves both online and mobile merchants, providing a secure payment gateway, merchant account, recurrent billing and credit card storage. The company’s APIs are used around the world, giving businesses in 40 countries in North America, Europe, and Australia the ability to accept payments in more than 130 different currencies. Braintree demonstrated its payment solution Venmo Touch at FinovateSpring 2013, and more recently has been a mainstay of our FinDEVr developer conferences on both East and West Coasts. Braintree, which was acquired by PayPal for $800 million in cash in 2013, announced that its Venmo P2P solution could be used for in-app purchases with selected merchants starting last month.

Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Finicity demoed its Data Services technology at FinovateSpring 2015, and more recently presented at FinDEVr New York 2016 this spring. At FinDEVr, Finicity unveiled the first TxPUSH-compliant, real-time aggregation service that pushes transaction data to software apps rather than the standard “pull” methodology common to most aggregation services. The company joined forces with fellow FinDEVr alum Intuit when the latter transitioned away from financial data services earlier this year, and acquired fellow Finovate alum Aurora Financial Systems last fall. Nick Thomas is president and co-founder.

Twilio demonstrated its Authy Two-Factor Authentication technology at FinDEVr San Francisco 2015 and at FinovateFall 2015. The company went public in June, raising more than $150 million, and now sports a market capitalization of $4 billion. Twilio announced that it would help AWS deliver SMS messages in July, and was named to the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 in June.

FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016 goes live 8/9 October. Join us for two days of developer-friendly presentations, demonstrations, case studies, and more. Tickets are on sale now. So visit our registration page today and save your spot!