Postman

Postman builds a platform that developers use to design, test, document and monitor application programming interfaces (APIs). It began in Bangalore as a side project of Abhinav Asthana, then an engineer at Yahoo, who wanted a simpler way to test APIs; co-founders Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane joined after the free tool had picked up users with no marketing. The company dates its founding to 2014, moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 2017 and keeps offices in Bangalore and Tokyo. Asthana is chief executive and Sobti is chief technology officer.

Postman raised a $1 million seed round in May 2015. Nexus Venture Partners led its October 2015 seed and Series A financing, which totaled $7 million, and Nexus managing director Jishnu Bhattacharjee joined the board. CRV led a $50 million Series B announced in June 2019, with Nexus participating and CRV general partner Devdutt Yellurkar joining the board. Insight Partners led a $150 million Series C in June 2020 at a $2 billion valuation, with CRV and Nexus returning. Insight Partners led again in a $225 million Series D in August 2021 at a $5.6 billion valuation, joined by new investors Coatue, Battery Ventures and BOND and existing backers CRV and Nexus, with Gokul Rajaram and Girish Mathrubootham investing as individuals. The company said it had raised more than $430 million across four rounds.

Postman remains privately held and has not announced new equity funding since the Series D. Its user base grew from more than 7 million users at more than 300,000 companies at the Series B, to 11 million at the Series C, 17 million at the Series D, and 20 million in April 2022; the company now describes more than 40 million users and 500,000 companies, and says nearly 98% of the Fortune 500 use it. It has since grown by acquisition, buying API observability company Akita in 2023, developer community platform Orbit in 2024, SDK generator liblab in November 2025 and documentation company Fern in January 2026.

Postman shows a developer-led, bottoms-up path to scale: the product spread through free downloads before it had a sales team. Nexus Venture Partners entered at seed in India and stayed through each round, while CRV and Insight Partners entered once usage was established and paid up to $2 billion and $5.6 billion respectively. Five years after the Series D, none of these investors has had a public liquidity event, so returns on the 2021 price remain unrealized.