Postman was founded in 2014 by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane in Bangalore, India. It started as a simple Chrome extension for testing REST APIs — developers could send HTTP requests and inspect responses without writing code. That utility caught on fast, and Postman grew into the most widely used API development tool in the world.
Today, Postman serves over 30 million developers and is used by teams at 98% of Fortune 500 companies. The platform has evolved far beyond basic request testing. It now covers the full API lifecycle: design, development, testing, documentation, monitoring, and collaboration.
Key features include Collections (organized groups of API requests), Environments (variable sets for different configurations), Mock Servers (simulating APIs before they’re built), Monitors (scheduled API tests), and Postman Flows (visual API workflow builder). The API documentation generator creates interactive docs directly from Collections.
Postman has raised over $430 million in funding, with a valuation of $5.6 billion as of its 2021 Series D round. The company’s revenue comes from paid plans for teams and enterprises that add collaboration features, role-based access control, and integrations with CI/CD pipelines.
The Postman Public API Network is a searchable repository of API definitions shared by companies and developers. It’s become a valuable discovery resource — you can find and fork API collections for services like Twitter, Stripe, and AWS.
Headquartered in San Francisco with significant engineering presence in Bangalore, Postman employs over 800 people. Asthana remains CEO and has been vocal about Postman’s mission to make APIs more accessible and collaboration around them easier.
