Postman - Collaboration Platform for API Development
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API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.
Postman is the provider of a collaboration platform designed to offer application program interface. Read this article to know more about the Postman, its products, founders, logo, business model, revenue, growth, challenges, funding, and achievements.
Postman - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Postman Inc. |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US |
| Industry | Software Development |
| Founded | September, 2014 |
| Founder | Abhijit Kane, Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti |
| CEO | Abhinav Asthana |
| Area Served | Worldwide |
| Website | www.postman.com |
Postman - About and How it Works?
Postman - Logo and its Meaning
Postman - Founder and History
Postman - Mission
Postman - Team Members
Postman - Business Model
Postman - Revenue and Growth
Postman - Funding and Investors
Postman - Competitors
Postman - Challenges Faced
Postman - Future Plans
Postman - FAQs
Postman - Conclusion
Postman - About and How it Works?
Postman is a collaboration platform designed to offer API development. Postman simplifies each step of building an API and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
The company's platform creates and sends HTTP requests, creates collections and folders to group requests logically, saves requests, switches contexts and customizes with scripts to simplifying collaboration across teams and organizations, enabling developers to build an application programming interface and improve developer productivity.
Postman - Logo and its Meaning
According to the Logo-designer Aditi, "we wanted something cool and geeky which has nothing to do with a postman, envelopes or delivering mail. "
After a few collaborative sessions, the team members identified these Postman qualities and started working on sketches and concepts. After a few iterations they settled on a flying space hero, a fun, geeky and meaningful image that the young team loved and identified with.
Postman - Founder and History
Postman was launched in the end of the year 2015, founded by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane.
Abhinav Asthana has also founded another startup called TeliportMe.
Abhinav Asthana worked as an intern for Yahoo, where he met his other two colleagues Ankit and Abhijit. They figured out that there were a lot of communication issues when it came to API testing but couldn't actually come to a conclusion on the solution to their problem. They were building a front-end architecture of an app, and that's when they had to work with APIs. They realized that tools to support API development were missing and sat down to write codes to solve the issue and posted it on the Chrome Webstore - and that's when things took off.
The issue Abhinav and Ankit were facing was keeping track of API updates - for example, one added feature on one API required an update on all other related APIs as well. The code Abhinav and Ankit wrote to ease the pains of API development soon went from an idea to a full-fledged business and an API management company with clients including Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, Sony and PayPal.
“We are solving a fundamental problem for the technology landscape. Big companies tend to be slower as they have many other things on their plate,” said Asthana.
Founded in Bangalore, Postman is described as the complete toolchain for API developers. It is an elegant, flexible tool used to build connected software via APIs-quickly, efficiently and accurately. At the seed round, Postman received $1 million funding from Nexus Venture Partners who also invested another $7 million in the Series A round for the startup.
"We have had a lot of inbound interest ever since we started as a company, but we felt Nexus was the best partner for us," said Asthana. We are scaling rapidly across all dimensions. There are many use cases that we still want to address over the coming months. We will also experiment with sales and invest in improving user experience,” he added.
Sarika Anand
Postman - Mission
Postman's mission statement says,
"At Postman, we create with the same curiosity that we see in our users. We value transparency and honest communication about not only successes, but mistakes. In our work, we focus on specific goals that add up to a larger vision. Our inclusive work culture ensures that everyone is valued equally important pieces of our final product. We are dedicated to delivering the best products we can."
Postman - Team Members
Postman has 13 current team members, including Co-Founder & CEO Abhinav Asthana. Some of which are:
- Abhinav Asthana - Co-Founder & CEO
- Ankit Sobti - Co-Founder & CTO
- Abhijit Kane - Co-Founder
- Numaan Ashraf - Engineering Manager
- Joyce Lin - Developer Evangelist
- Trish Scearce - Senior Counsel
- Sanjeev Sisodiya - VP of Customer Success (leading Support, Success and Enterprise Sales teams)
- David Cowgill - Head of Marketing Operations
- Sameer Brij Verma - Board Member
Postman - Business Model
The Postman business model is in alignment with enterprise objectives. The Postman Pro and Enterprise offerings are all about scaled usage of the platform, which includes the number of collections, users, teams, workspaces, and the collaboration, automation, and orchestration across them.
All the core Postman features are free, and will remain free—developers love Postman because of its utility, and we do not intend to mess with that. Paying for Postman means you are getting more organized about how you manage users, collections, environments, teams, and workspaces, as well as using more monitors, runners, mocks, and documentation. While more usage doesn’t always mean an organization is doing things in a more logical fashion, but Postman enterprise features center around the organized governance of users, teams, workspaces, collections, and environments, steering enterprise customers towards optimizing how things get done.
Sarika Anand
Postman - Revenue and Growth
Postman's estimated annual revenue was noted at $53.4M in 2020. Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simplify development, tests, and management of APIs through its platform, has now become the highest valued VC-funded Saas startup in India with a valuation of $5.6 billion while it closed its Series D round of funding where the company raised around $225 million on August 18, 2021. This is noted to be nearly a two-fold jump from the $2 billion valuations last year.
Postman - Funding and Investors
Postman has raised a total of $433M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding of $225M was raised on August 18, 2021 from a Series D round led by Insight Partners, Coatue, Battery Ventures, BOND, Nexus Ventures and more.
Postman is funded by 3 lead investors, Nexus Venture Partners, Insight Partners and CRV.
| Date | Round | Lead Investor Name | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 18, 2021 | Series D | Insight Partners | $225M |
| Jun 11, 2020 | Series C | Insight Partners | $150M |
| Jun 19, 2019 | Series B | CRV | $50M |
| Oct 13, 2016 | Series A | Nexus Venture Partners | $7M |
| May 26, 2015 | Seed Round | - | $1M |
Postman - Competitors
Postman's top competitors category-wise are as follows:
- API Development - Swagger, Apiary, Gelato, MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Â and Smartbear
- API Testing - Smartbear, Katalon, RapidAPI, and Karate.
- API Monitoring - Google Apigee API Management Platform, Loggly, Alertsite, Seematext, Azure API Management and AppDyanmics
Postman - Challenges Faced
While the coding and everything else seemed to run well, creating a great product is one thing and building a company to sell the said product is another thing entirely. Each entrepreneur will have his or her share of challenges.
Abhijeet Kane, Product Architect and co-founder says, "Once you hit revenue, there is no way you can survive as a product without the leadership team being good." He adds, "One of the first challenges was that we were dealing with a huge user-base. The second thing is just the overwhelming amount of information that you have to juggle in your head, at all times."
The startup was in the beginning more of a side project for Abhinav in 2012. Later it raised $150 million on June 12, 2020, which was the firm's highest fundraising round after almost a year at a valuation of $2 billion. This round last year was already a pace-setter for Postman, thereby opening many more doors for raising funds. According to the company, today 98% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform provided by Postman.
Purbalee Dutta
Postman - Future Plans
“Roads have always existed, but we put traffic lights when many cars appeared. Similarly, the sheer demand for creating more and more APIs required the development of new kinds of tools to help you handle that complexity,” said Abhinav Asthana, CEO and cofounder of Postman.
Since Postman’s suite of products hinges on making collaboration between developers easier, one major threat to its business model could be the movement of the software world towards a gig economy, a shift that the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating.
Postman’s strategy has been to extend free customer support which is a feature many SaaS companies monetize as an add-on service. Apart from that, the API platform’s VC dollars have also gone into setting up a globally distributed support team and a developer relations team.
Given that most developers in the world are already using Postman’s platform, the only way for the startup to keep growing is to expand its use cases and iterate on top of the existing product. For this reason, the startup which started with just one API protocol called REST, has now expanded into others such as GraphQL, SOAP and is seeing demand for more categories.
This would, however, still be just scratching the surface of what APIs would be doing in the next few years— according to research firm Gartner, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue will be generated through services enabled by APIs by 2023, up from 15% in 2018.
Postman - FAQs
Is Postman an Indian company?
Postman, an Indian software as a service (SaaS) startup that helps businesses build and test their application programming interfaces, or APIs.
What is postman used for?
Postman is a popular API client that makes it easy for developers to create, share, test and document APIs. This is done by allowing users to create and save simple and complex HTTP/s requests, as well as read their responses. The result - more efficient and less tedious work.
How does a postman make money?
Postman offers some of its services in limited capacity for free to users. For the rest, it charges between $8 to $18 per user to its customers. That's how the company generates revenue.
Is postman free to use?
The company provides both free and paid versions.
Postman - Conclusion
Postman is a web-based platform that allows businesses and developers to design, develop, and manage Application Programming Interfaces. Postman is the collaboration platform for API development, used by 11 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible tool for building connected software via APIs quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is a global company with headquarters in San Francisco, a large office in Bangalore (where the company was founded), and distributed team members on four continents. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, CRV, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at http://www.postman.com.
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