Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
Today, I’m happy to announce that Akita—who has built the fastest, easiest way to understand your APIs in production—has joined Postman. With this exciting acquisition, we will be adding automated, eBPF-based API discovery and API monitoring capabilities to the Postman API Platform.
Like Postman, Akita believes in building practical tooling that meets developers where they are, based on the premise that APIs have fundamentally changed how teams build web apps. We first came across Akita, led by founder Jean Yang, after recognizing this alignment in a few of Jean’s blog posts, “The Case for Developer Experience” and “Building for 99% Developers.” At that time, we were inspired to see how we might partner in the future.
Since we first met the Akita team, they have built a solution that automatically discovers and monitors APIs simply by watching API traffic, without requiring special frameworks or SDKs. At the same time, usage of Postman workspaces and collections has shown us how much software teams want a central source of truth for their APIs. As Postman has scaled to bigger and bigger customers, we have seen firsthand how hard it is, especially for larger companies, to get that source of truth. When our own team was able to onboard onto the Akita app to see all of our API behavior in under thirty minutes, we knew it was time to join forces.
Akita’s CEO also saw great potential in a partnership. “We knew that the rise of Postman meant we’d always be building with them in mind,” says Jean. “As we came to talk more with Postman about our goals around helping developers understand their own API behavior, it became clear that our team could reach our goals much faster by building on top of the Postman platform.”
Our investment in Akita reflects the Postman belief in developer-first tooling across the API lifecycle. Today, developers have all kinds of APIs in systems that may have been running for years. It is crucial to accept that many teams aren’t in a position to put in a lot of developer effort to use new tools with their APIs. API gateways and application performance monitoring (APM) don’t solve the problem, as they both require developers to provide that initial knowledge about their systems. APIs have shifted the source of truth to production and Postman is investing in this API-first future.
“The Flickr API has been a tool for developers and photo enthusiasts for over a decade, but to maintain and grow that legacy, we need to understand how it’s used and how to improve it for developers,” says Head of Flickr Alexander Seville. “Akita made it possible for us to quickly and easily track our APIs in use, even the parts run on legacy code. We were excited to use a product that was such a great fit for our site, and even more excited to see how it evolves as part of Postman!”
We’re looking forward to uniting the Akita team with Postman’s existing efforts in API observability—all to make it easier for developers to not just work with the APIs they know well, but also legacy APIs and APIs that have drifted from the original design. By doing so, we will help engineering teams better understand the API-based software they’ve built, find and fix issues faster, and make their customers happier.
Be an early user of Akita’s first contribution to the Postman API Platform by signing up for the beta version of our Live Collections Agent here.
Related: What is API Observability?
Very natural move for both of the teams! Was watching Akita project from the start, and they indeed brought some interesting new concepts to our industry!
This is an incredible partnership and I hope Akita & Postman achieve tremendous success together. All the best. (An incredible move on Postman’s part, reinforces their position in the market!)