Postman raises $7mn Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners
Postman, the platform that helps developers build, test, document, and share their APIs at a faster pace, today raised $7 million in funding from Nexus Venture Partners. This is the second round of funding for the Bengaluru- and Austin-based startup. Last October-end, the company had raised $1 million from Nexus Venture Partners, which was essentially used to build a stronger collaboration platform.
Abhinav Asthana, Co-founder and CEO of Postman said they are now looking to strengthen the product, focus on the US operations, and hire across the board. Speaking of the latest investment in Postman, Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners and Postman board member says that every developer in the world will benefit from using Postman.
He also believes that Postman is at the very centre of the industry of connected software and that it is poised for huge growth. Launched in November last year, Postman today has over three million developers using their platform and 1.5 million active monthly users across over 30,000 companies.
Postman is Abhinav’s second startup. In 2010, he had co-founded TeliportMe, and before that was working at Yahoo as an intern.
During his time at Yahoo, Abhinav met Ankit Sobti, the Co-founder and CTO of Postman. It was when the duo was building the front-end architecture of an app that they came in touch with API. Abhinav says:
At that time, testing APIs was a pain. There were a lot of communication issues with different teams. We thought of making the problem simpler, but being first-time engineers we didn’t work on the problem then. We started Postman to address issues that I confronted personally as a developer.
Some of Postman's clients include IBM, Box, VMware, Walgreens, Intuit, and Apigee. Initially, Postman just helped with testing of the APIs. Now, with Postman Collections, developers can construct better. It was when people began sharing the Postman Collections that collaboration, syncing, and other features came in.
Speaking of their first investment in Postman, Jishnu says,
"The thing about Postman was that it was a small team working on a product that had a global impact. They had a high bar, which automatically made them frugal and tight-knit. Building is not an expensive affair in today’s world. The goal is that every developer needs to use Postman, and it should become a core component of the enterprise software solution stack."
Some products similar to Postman include Runscope, Paw, StopLight, RESTClient, SmartBear, and RAML. A report by Gartner suggests that by 2017, close to 268 billion downloads of mobile apps are likely to generate a cumulative revenue of $77 billion. The report also stated that open-source frameworks, app markets, and mobile DevOps will increase exponentially. This year, API testing is one of the topmost requirements by enterprises.