Postman CEO and cofounder Abhinav Asthana remembers that while interning at Yahoo he noticed that the application programming interfaces (APIs) that he worked with were not well documented, meaning that they didn't include crucial information about how they should be effectively used.
APIs allow apps to communicate with, and include features from, other services: For example, an app may use Facebook or Google's APIs to allow users log in through those other accounts. If an API isn't working for one part of an application, it could break another part, and having poorly documented APIs can exacerbate those problems. Asthana's memories of his API struggles at Yahoo stayed with him "for a while," until he realized that it wasn't only a problem at Yahoo.
From that epiphany, he built Postman, an API development platform that just raised a $150 million Series C funding round led by Insight Partners. Postman's valuation has soared to a whopping $2 billion thanks to Thursday's news.
Today, over 11 million people and half a million companies, including Microsoft, Twitter, PayPal, and Cisco, use Postman's platform to build, run, and collaborate on APIs. The company plans to invest the new funding in hiring engineers, designers, and salespeople, and scaling its partnerships.
"My focus has been helping developers solve this whole challenge of building software, when it comes to building APIs," Asthana told Business Insider. "That's what we've been doing for the past few years. The funding is a big validation of our efforts in growing our community and growing our platform."
Postman started as a side project
Asthana started Postman as a side project in 2012 while also acting as founder and CTO of photography startup TeliportMe. He started interviewing senior architects across industries to learn more about how their companies worked with and collaborated on APIs.
Issues he heard about from those engineers were echoed in his own experience at TeliportMe, where too often one team would update an API without notifying any other teams that could be affected by changes. He wanted to find a way to streamline the API development and update process.
"It started from a pain point of me wanting to develop APIs and work with my coworkers better," Asthana said.
Postman actually launched as a company in 2014. Since then, Asthana says Postman has become the "de facto standard" for APIs.
"We just knew we were solving a real fundamental problem," Asthana said. "What we're getting from customers is so phenomenal: how individual developers love it. That has led to an increasing amount of ambition."
Postman's goals for the future
Asthana says that Postman is committed to helping developers in any way they need as the number of APIs increases because of their importance in building apps.
"We're intent on listening to developers," Asthana said. "We call this the 'developer first mentality.' Legacy enterprises didn't listen the way we did when it comes to APIs."
He adds that the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impacts have not affected Postman's adoption and customer growth. If anything, the company's seeing more business than before.
"We found ourselves in a good place," Asthana said. "What we had been advocating was a good way to build software. It fits the situation a lot better."
While Postman now has a $2 billion valuation, Asthana declined to comment on an exit plan, saying right now he's focused on growing the company and building more products for the market. He says his goal is for Postman to become the API platform for every company.
"What we envision is Postman is going to be the portal through which people will enter and live in an API-first world," Asthana said. "This is where people learn to use APIs for the first time and build APIs for the first time."
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