API development platform Postman nabs $225M

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Postman, a collaboration platform for API development, today announced that it raised $225 million in a series D funding round led by Insight Partners. The proceeds, which value the company at $5.6 billion, bring Postman’s total raised to over $430 million and will be used to expand its teams across sales, marketing, product, and engineering, according to cofounder and CEO Abhinav Asthana.

As McKinsey notes, APIs, which were once largely limited to technical domains, have become a significant engine of business growth, allowing organizations to monetize data, forge partnerships, and open new pathways for innovation. Markets and Markets expects the global app API programming management market size to grow from $1.2 billion in 2018 to $5.1 billion by 2023 at a compound annual growth rate of 32.9%.

San Francisco, California-based Postman, which was founded in 2014 by Asthana, Abhijit Kane, and Ankit Sobti, offers an API creation and governance platform for large enterprise customers. The company’s private API network enables users to build a centralized API catalog on Postman, while the public network lets them share and discover APIs, validations for API security, and quality.

Asthana, Postman’s cofounder and CEO, set out to create a tool that would simplify the API testing process. As the tool’s usage grew, Abhinav recruited two of his former colleagues, Sobti and Kane, to help him create Postman.

“We have billions of data points around how APIs are designed, used, and operated. Our customers are looking for improvements to their API lifecycle, security, and quality — all of which data can be very beneficial in providing insights about. We continue to invest in this area heavily and we will have more announcements soon,” Asthana told VentureBeat via email.

API ecosystem

Postman offers a set of tools to support the API lifecycle, from design, testing, documentation, and mocking to discovery. It allows developers to store, iterate, and collaborate around API artifacts and organize their work throughout an organization, with features like search, notifications, alerts and security warnings, and reporting.

Postman says that the capital from the latest funding round will enable it to invest in its community of developers, as well as support students through API literacy programs and contribute toward open source API projects. Beyond this, Postman plans to introduce a new version of the Postman API; support for new protocols; integrations with third-party vendors like Amazon Web Services, GitHub, and GitLab; and capabilities like its recently released Flow Runner API composition tool.

“We are heavily investing in our road map based upon our feedback loops with our customers and the community. We are expanding the Postman platform across areas that technical users need along with supporting the needs of business users. At a high level, we are investing in supporting workflows for all kinds of APIs — whether they are private APIs, partner APIs, or public APIs,” Asthana said.

Another area that Postman is exploring is AI-driven intelligence for APIs, according to Asthana. “Postman customers use Postman as a source of truth for their APIs, and there are many kinds of insights that they are looking for. We will be investing heavily in this area to extend our capabilities,” he said.

Postman’s business substantially grew during the pandemic; its private API network became among the largest in the world, with 17 million users across 500,000 organizations. The company has 98% of the Fortune 500 as customers, including Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and Microsoft.

Postman’s workforce currently numbers around 425 employees, and Asthana expects it grow beyond 500 by the end of the year.