Ever wondered how a hotel booking app keeps track of the available rooms and other information through a single website? The answer is through APIs. You want to know the live cricket score through Google and you get the detail without any cricketing app owned by Google. This is the beauty of Application Programming Interface(API). APIs allow different applications, devices, businesses, and individuals to share their data/functionalities among themselves. In simple terms, API is being used for communication purposes among software.
In the beginning, keeping track of API updates was very difficult. The API testing process was a pain for developers. Postman came up with an idea to solve these API issues and became instantly popular.
While developing a front end architecture of software in Yahoo, Abhinav Asthana(Co-founder and CEO, Postman) and Ankit Sobti(Co-founder and CTO, Postman) faced API debugging issues. To ease the APIs communication, they both thought to solve this issue but dropped the idea in between.
Later in 2012, Abhinav launched a startup called TeliportMe. Again, the same APIs issues were faced by him and this time, he developed the code for himself to ease his work. Since the code was giving good results so he posted that product over chrome store for free use. It became very popular with developers. In 2012 itself, the product was downloaded 2000 times. Their product became popular with Postman’s name.
After looking at the positive response of investors and the popularity of open source code, Abhinav connected with his yahoo colleague Ankit and Abhijit Kane (his peer from BITS Pilani Goa). Abhijit worked as an intern in TeliportMe. Initially, Abhinav and Ankit used to work on a postman project part-time. Abhijit used to commute frequently from Bangalore to Mumbai, where Ankit used to stay.
As a result of further discussions among this trio, Bangalore based Postman was founded in 2014. Later its headquarter was shifted to San Francisco. The main idea behind the Postman launch was to support their old open-source product and add more features in Software as a Service(SaaS) products.
Nexus ventures partners invested $7 Million in 2016 as a Postman Series A funding round. As part of their series B round funding, CRV invested $50 million on June 20, 2019. Postman waited for 6 years to join the unicorn club. Insight partners on June 11, 2020, under series C funding, invested $150 Million to make Postman’s valuation $2 Billion.
In the B round of funding, postman valuation was estimated at around $350 Million. It clearly indicates that postman valuation increased 500 percent in the last year. That is the kind of impact, the company is making in the API field.
Earlier postman was only limited to testing APIs, but funding helped them in building strong collaboration platforms. The company also believes that instead of a code-based approach, software engineers are moving to an API based approach. In the coming years, Software development will totally be driven by innovative APIs.
Postman mainly focuses on developers only. And developers are very vocal on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook about how good the Postman API platform is. To connect all users on a single platform, postman started a POSTCON conference. This conference is held every year.
In the current era, no software engineer lives without Postman if they ever work on APIs. Postman has become a default tool in API testing and development. 500000 companies use the Postman API platform. 98% of the fortune 500 companies are using Postman. 10 Million users are taking advantage of Postman API platform. Postman’s annual recurring revenue is around $54 Million.
In pandemic time, Postman is providing free customer support to its clients. For individual developers, most of the Postman features are free and will remain free in the future as well. For teams and business firms having users up to 99, the plan pricing is posted over their website. Enterprises having more than 100 users have to contact the sales team of Postman to know the actual pricing. Swagger, Smartbear, Karate, Loggly, and Azure API are some of the major competitors of Postman.
