Meet the founders of Fern: CEO Danny Sheridan and CTO Deep Singhvi

Maintaining SDKs and API docs is a grind—sometimes requiring a full engineering team. Some companies try to automate it themselves, but only the Amazons of the world can justify the resources required to solve this at scale.

Fern changes that. Instead of building in-house, teams can now buy a streamlined, production-ready solution. Fern’s platform auto-generates clean, well-documented SDKs across languages—saving time and delivering the developer experience modern teams expect.

David Cowan, Lindsey Li, and Lance Co Ting Keh are excited to lead Fern’s $9M Series A. This is the team to make frictionless API integration the new standard — and define what API integrations will look like in a wave soon to be powered by AI agents. We sat down with co-founders CEO Danny Sheridan and CTO Deep Singhvi to share more about what they are building. 

Q&A with the founders of Fern

What inspired you to start Fern?

When we started Fern, we set out to solve a specific pain point. Even with technological advancements and AI, APIs are still incredibly frustrating. For anyone working on developer tools or API platforms, it’s a time-consuming, error-prone, and often thankless job. Yet, today’s developers expect a seamless, polished experience. We saw a clear opportunity to automate this critical but underserved part of the stack.

We first met at the University of Michigan back in 2015. After spending four years at Amazon and Palantir, we were exposed to mission-critical SDK code generation tooling – Smithy and Conjure. While these tech giants could afford dedicated engineering teams to generate client and server bindings in a variety of languages like, Python, TypeScript, and Java most companies can’t justify such an investment. Instead, companies turn to open-source SDK generators, which are often inconsistent in quality, require post-generation manual fixes, and don’t support critical features such as OAuth 2.0 flows or streaming (server-sent events).

What exactly does Fern do?

Fern levels the playing field by making world-class SDKs and API docs accessible to every company, automating the tedious work of building and maintaining SDKs and an in-house documentation platform. Since launching in 2023, we’ve been trusted by over 150 customers, including industry leaders like Square, Webflow, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, and Intercom, to power their developer experience (DX) and agent experience (AX).

Why do you believe this is such an urgent problem to solve right now?

We’ve entered an era of unprecedented software velocity. APIs are evolving faster than ever, and the old way of manually maintaining SDKs and Docs just doesn’t scale. We’ve designed our SDKs and Docs for both human developers and AI agents.

We have also launched an MCP server generator so LLMs can call your API from Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop, or ChatGPT Desktop. The future of API integrations will involve AI agents that can evaluate API providers, acquire API credentials, generate integration code, and adapt to API changes automatically—minimizing developer effort.

In Docs, Fern’s Ask AI resolves technical questions on demand—like having a product expert always available. Connect to knowledge sources like Slack, GitHub, Zendesk, and more to expand its knowledge.

We are also developing automation to scan documentation for manually added code snippets and run tests to ensure they compile, run, and work as described. This AI-driven auditing process helps catch outdated or broken examples, ensuring developers and AI agents always have reliable, executable code.

What’s next for Fern?

The ultimate vision is to make API integrations feel like magic. It’s clear that API calls made by AI will soon outnumber those made by human developers. The next wave of integrations will be powered by AI agents. Just as a great developer experience redefined how human developers interact with an API, Fern is defining what API integrations look like for AI agents.

And by the way — we’re hiring!