Postman, headquartered in Bangalore, India, which lets developers build, test, and share APIs, today announced a series A funding round of US$7 million from Nexus Venture Partners. (TechinAsia)
Founded by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane as a side project in 2012, Postman provides free apps for Chrome, Mac, and Windows to build APIs. For cloud-based API access, there’s payment, and there’s also an enterprise option. “We created Postman to address issues that I confronted personally as a developer, and our market acceptance shows that this was a critical need,” Abhinav says in a company announcement made today.
The paid product, Postman Cloud, a subscription service that provides additional collaboration, testing, and documentation tools for both small and large development teams. It also provides access to API libraries.
APIs or application programming interfaces allow one application to work with another. For example, a food delivery or taxi app can use Google Maps because Google has an API which opens up a part of its code for an external app to access. In an increasingly interconnected world of apps, APIs have become an enabler of new possibilities.
Postman was incorporated in 2014 and has a 15-member team across Bangalore, Austin, and San Francisco. It claims to have over 3 million active installations and more than 1.5 million active monthly users at 30,000 companies.
“This company’s growth mirrors the huge growth of the API industry. According to ProgrammableWeb, the number of public APIs has grown from just over 5,000 in January 2012 to a current count of nearly 16,000,” says Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, who is now on Postman’s board. “Postman is at the center of the industry of connected software and poised for huge growth.”
Box, Walgreens, Intuit, IBM, VMware, and Apigee are on Postman’s client roster. Three of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms, 61 of the Fortune 100 companies, and nine of the ten largest retailers in the world use Postman, the company claims. “Postman’s apps are downloaded more than 10,000 times every day,” says Abhinav Asthana.
The company had raised a seed round of US$1 million in funding last year from undisclosed investors. The latest infusion of capital will go into development work and marketing.