18-year-old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot are defying the norm by spending their summer working on their startup, APIGen, rather than enjoying their last summer before college. They received a $500,000 pre-seed investment from Varana Capital, allowing them to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. APIGen is developing a platform that builds custom APIs from natural language prompts, enabling businesses to easily connect different applications and perform complex tasks. The founders, who met on their school’s debate team, realized the need for such a platform while building a chatbot that relied on APIs. They found the process of creating APIs to be challenging and decided to focus on solving that problem. After crafting an alpha version of their idea and receiving feedback from local programmers, they reached out to VCs and eventually caught the attention of Philip Broenniman, founder of Varana Capital. Impressed by the teens’ presentation and insights, Varana offered them a $250,000 pre-seed investment with an additional $250,000 in a SAFE note. Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot have already built a community of supporters in Boulder’s active AI Meetup, and they are working towards releasing a beta version of their product this month. Despite competition in the market, Varana sees great potential in APIGen and believes in the founders’ abilities to carve out their own space. The opportunity for return on investment is promising, making APIGen a compelling venture.