API toolchain provider Postman raises $7m in Series A round
Postman, which has created an API testing and management suite, has announced that it has received $7 million in Series A financing from Nexus Venture Partners, a firm that invests in tech companies in the US and India. The funds will be used for ongoing development work and marketing.
Emerging as a side project in 2012, Postman aims to help developers run, test, document, and share APIs.
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Postman was incorporated in 2014 by chief executive officer Abhinav Asthana, chief technology officer Ankit Sobti, and product architect Abhijit Kane, with the goal to create "a complete API toolchain, which would include every feature a developer would need to work with APIs."
"Creating Postman has been an amazing experience for us. It was a product I started in my spare time based on experiences Ankit and I had at Yahoo. When I first started working with APIs, I realised that I hated curl. I just knew there had to be a better way," Asthana said.
"As we got further with the Postman app, we realised that the API development workflow could be improved ... Postman gives people a shared language and a shared tool to communicate more efficiently."
Postman provides free apps for Chrome, Mac and Windows. Its only paid product is Postman Cloud, which operates on a subscription model and provides additional team collaboration tools for both small and large development teams.
Postman is currently working on completing its core product -- the API toolchain, which includes team collaboration tools, API documentation, testing, and monitoring. It is also building an enterprise version of its product for larger organisations that need specific features around security, governance, and account support. The company plans to release the enterprise product later this year.
The company currently boasts more than 3 million users worldwide, 1.5 million of which are monthly active users, and a customer base that includes more than 30,000 companies including Box, Intuit, IBM, VMware, and Apigee.
"Not only [is it] important that businesses care about APIs, but it's also inevitable," Asthana said.
"Every business function in the world is going to be available via an API in the future," he added.
"For the consumer, this will translate into more robust and faster new technologies, though the APIs will be hidden from view."
According to Asthana, Postman's biggest competitor is inertia by developers, who have established workflow habits.
"Using a new tool requires overcoming that inertia, and seeing the benefits in a new workflow," he added.
Postman is headquartered in Bangalore, with offices in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.