Postman raises $225 mn at a $5.6 bn valuation

Postman—a collaboration platform for application programming interface (API) development—on Wednesday said that it has raised $225 million in a Series D funding round valuing the company at $5.6 billion. The latest financing round was led by existing investor New York-based Insight Partners along with new investors: Coatue, Battery Ventures, and BOND. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and CRV also participated in the round. Till date, Postman has raised over $430 million across four rounds.

Last year during the Covid-19 pandemic, Postman raised $150 million in a Series C funding round led by venture capital fund Insight Partners that catapulted its valuation to close to $2 billion, making it a unicorn—which are privately-held companies with a valuation of $1 billion or more.

Founded in Bengaluru and now headquartered in San Francisco, Postman builds platforms for the development and management of API, a set of code that enables interaction between different software. Started in 2014 by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane, Postman today has the world's 17 million-odd software developers and five lakh organisations on its API platform.

“APIs have quickly become the fundamental building blocks of software used by developers in every industry, in every country across the globe—and Postman has firmly established itself as the preferred platform for developers,” Jeff Horing, managing director, Insight Partners said in a statement. “Postman has the opportunity to become a key pillar of how enterprises build, deliver products, and seamlessly enable partnerships across the ecosystem. Their continued, rapid expansion and strong management team point to a future for Postman with virtually unlimited possibilities.”

The company said that the latest funding round also saw participation from Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of SaaS major Freshworks and Gokul Rajaram, product leader at U.S.-listed food-delivery company DoorDash.

Postman will use the fresh capital to expand its teams in the areas of sales, marketing, product, and engineering. In addition, the company will continue to invest in its community of developers across the globe, support students through innovative API literacy programs, and contribute toward open source projects to foster a strong API ecosystem.

“This new round of funding will help Postman dramatically increase the speed of that forward motion. We’re committed to helping developers who are building the future with APIs,” Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder, Postman said in a statement.

Postman has added more than 300 employees across 13 countries since the beginning of 2020, more than doubling its headcount, as well as adding thousands of new customers to a customer base that includes 98% of the Fortune 500 and the likes of Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and Microsoft.

The company recently said that its Public API Network is currently the largest API hub in the world, with more than 75,000 APIs shared on the network.