--- title: "About — why the Theneo team built Elva · Elva" description: "Elva comes from Theneo, where 20,000 companies built API docs. Six questions kept coming up in onboarding; Elva is the system of record that answers them." canonical: "https://getelva.ai/about" lastModified: "2026-09-01T23:11:23.016Z" --- 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. 20,000 COMPANIES ON THENEO YC Y COMBINATOR BACKED Atlassian VENTURES INVESTOR Fortune 500 IN PRODUCTION TODAY TRUSTED WHERE APIS CANNOT GO DOWN ![Ticketmaster](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/ticketmaster-1.svg) ![Corpay](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/corpay.svg) _Instantly_ ![Corgi](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/logo4.svg) ![SimilarWeb](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/similarweb.svg) ![Infor](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/infor.svg) ![TNS](https://getelva.ai/assets/logos/tns.svg) Ticketmaster, FIS, Corpay, Infor, SimilarWeb. Elva is the layer they kept asking us for. 2021 Theneo launches API docs that write themselves 2023 20,000 catalogs The same six questions, every time 2025 Agents arrive The human buffer disappears Now Elva The 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, AGAIN 01 / 06 “How many endpoints do we actually have?” “Can we deprecate this one?” “Is this safe to give a partner?” “Who broke the integration?” “Is this API any good?” “Can an agent use this?” answer Nobody knew. The spec covered a third; the rest lived in code three teams had touched. Unanswerable without grepping every frontend. So it stayed in production forever. Decided in a meeting, from memory, with no record of which fields they would receive. A field vanished from a response. Finding the commit and the consumer took days. No definition of good, no score to argue with. Only opinions, held with varying confidence. The newest question, and the one that made every question above urgent instead of annoying. 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, 2019 reads 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 CALLS 1 DAMAGE none ![Claude](https://getelva.ai/assets/icons/claude.svg) An agent, today incident 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 CALLS 60 DUPLICATE PAYOUTS 14 P95 2.4s 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-MSFT Built at Microsoft scale Where one bad schema decision reaches millions of callers before anyone notices. ex-GOOG Operated at Google scale Thousands of internal services, and the versioning discipline that survives them. 20,000 API catalogs seen The good, the undocumented, and the ones held together by one engineer’s memory. ∞ Pages carried Platform leads who ran the gateways and know which parts should never have been manual. MANIFESTO four opinions the product is built on 01 The code is the only honest source A document a human maintains is a document that will be wrong by Thursday. 02 Quality has to be a number Scoring every endpoint turns an argument into a task list. 03 Governance that cannot say no is theater A report about a breaking change is not governance. A publish that gets blocked is. 04 Agents are consumers, not a feature If 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. ## Built on 20,000 API catalogs. Free on your first repo. Connect a repo. See the surface you own in about a minute. [Sign up free](https://app.getelva.ai/signup) [See plans](https://getelva.ai/pricing.md)