About Elva

We documented APIs for 20,000 companies. Docs were never the hard part.

Thousands of teams arrived at Theneo ready to publish, then found nobody could say what their API surface was, who called it, or what would break.

TRUSTED WHERE APIS CANNOT GO DOWN

Ticketmaster, FIS, Corpay, Infor, SimilarWeb. Elva is the layer they kept asking us for.

2021Theneo launchesAPI docs that write themselves

202320,000 catalogsThe same six questions, every time

2025Agents arriveThe human buffer disappears

NowElvaThe layer they kept asking for

Why we built it

Why we built Elva: six questions we could never answer

Teams arrived at the last mile, docs blocking the launch. Then the questions started, and none of them were about docs.

ASKED IN ONBOARDING, AGAIN01 / 06

“How many endpoints do we actually have?”

answer

Nobody knew. The spec covered a third; the rest lived in code three teams had touched.

THE QUEUE

Docs were the symptom. The disease is that almost nobody has a system of record for their own APIs.

What agents changed

What agents changed: same bad field name, two very different Tuesdays

A developer, 2019reads the error, stops

POST /payouts { amount, currency }

← 400 "fee_mode" is required

reads the error

greps the codebase, finds an enum

fixes it once, ships

CALLS1

DAMAGEnone

An agent, todayincident

POST /payouts × 60 args mutating

← 400 "fee_mode" is required

guesses fee_mode: "standard" → 201

no idempotency key, retries anyway

14 duplicate payouts created

reports success to its user

CALLS60

DUPLICATE PAYOUTS14

P952.4s

Elva means thunder. It is the part that arrives fast and gets noticed.

Who is building it

Who is building Elva: people who have carried the pager for an API

ex-MSFTBuilt at Microsoft scaleWhere one bad schema decision reaches millions of callers before anyone notices.

ex-GOOGOperated at Google scaleThousands of internal services, and the versioning discipline that survives them.

20,000API catalogs seenThe good, the undocumented, and the ones held together by one engineer’s memory.

∞Pages carriedPlatform leads who ran the gateways and know which parts should never have been manual.

MANIFESTOfour opinions the product is built on

01The code is the only honest sourceA document a human maintains is a document that will be wrong by Thursday.

02Quality has to be a numberScoring every endpoint turns an argument into a task list.

03Governance that cannot say no is theaterA report about a breaking change is not governance. A publish that gets blocked is.

04Agents are consumers, not a featureIf an agent can call your API, it deserves the same auth, limits, and logs as any partner.

FAQ

Who is behind Elva?

The team at Theneo, the API documentation platform used by 20,000 companies. Elva is their answer to what API management needs to become when agents join the consumer list.

Why did Theneo build Elva?

Years of making API docs readable for humans made the gap obvious: AI agents do not read prose, they read schemas and act on them. Elva gives APIs the catalog, contracts, and governed access that agents require.

How does Elva relate to Theneo?

Elva is a Theneo product with its own platform at getelva.ai. Documentation lives at docs.getelva.ai, and both share the same team.

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