Postman’s Series D Funding and the API-First World

Abhinav Asthana

August 18, 2021· 6 mins

I am excited to announce a huge milestone for Postman today: We’ve closed a Series D investment round of $225 million that values the company at $5.6 billion. The round was led by Insight Partners and joined by three new investors—Coatue, Battery Ventures, and BOND. We also had enthusiastic participation from existing Postman investors CRV and Nexus Venture Partners. In addition, DoorDash Product Leader Gokul Rajaram and Freshworks Founder Girish Mathrubootham joined as individual investors.

“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,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Jeff Horing. “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.”

A little over a year ago, Postman closed a Series C investment round, and in that announcement blog post I described the “Postman flywheel” that helps guide us in our decisions on how to make the Postman platform increasingly powerful and effective for our customers.

The Postman flywheel

Today, the Postman flywheel is running faster than it ever has, with strong momentum in a number of key areas:

• Developers: There are now 17 million developers on the Postman API Platform, and the Postman app has been downloaded more than 60 million times so far.
• Collaboration for teams: After recently announcing unlimited collaboration for small teams in Postman, we’re seeing record amounts of collaboration activity on the platform today.
• Enterprise customers: We continue to add phenomenal customers like Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and more. You can read more on our case studies page.
• The Public API Network: The Postman Public API Network recently became the world’s largest public API hub, and it has quickly grown to more than 20,000 public workspaces (from top organizations like Mercedes-Benz, Notion, Microsoft Graph, and more) that enable developers, teams, and companies around the world to work together on APIs at a scale that was never before possible.

The API-first world

Along with this momentum at Postman and in the API industry overall, we’ve also observed a bigger shift that’s directly related to it all: The world is increasingly becoming API-first.

Now, there’s quite a bit of discussion across the industry these days about what exactly “API-first” means, so we decided to choose an unconventional medium to explain it. Folks here at Postman are big fans of reading, and of science fiction, and of graphic novels, so we decided to create a graphic novel to describe the API-first world.

Shruthi Venkatesh, a visual designer here at Postman, brought this idea to life with her illustrations in a brand-new graphic novel that I am very excited about sharing with you, “The API-First World.” Please give it a read.

An illustration from our new graphic novel, “The API-First World”

Now that you’ve seen this vision of the API-first world through our new graphic novel, you might ask: What is Postman doing to bring about that vision? To get there, Postman has been relentlessly focused on—and will continue to focus on in the future via the Series D investment—the two foundational elements of Postman’s success to date: the product and the community. Here’s a recap of some of the recent activity in each of these areas:

What happened in the last year for the Postman product

The API-first world requires an API platform that enables more people to do more with APIs, and Postman continues to release new capabilities at a fast pace to achieve that objective. Just a few examples: Postman on the web, public workspaces, the Private API Network, the Public API Network, API security validations, OpenAPI validations, support for protocols like WebSockets and SOAP, user groups, and SCIM integration, along with hundreds of other improvements.

We also completed the SOC 2 Type 2 security-validation milestone this year, while also creating new partnerships with Datadog, New Relic, Opsgenie, and AWS API Gateway to help our customers solve many modern challenges.

​”Coatue was impressed by Postman’s ability to solve challenges faced by developers worldwide who need to build software faster than ever. We also liked Postman’s work towards providing management teams, regardless of size, proper visibility into their API landscape and to ensure that increasingly lean teams can effectively maintain APIs,” said Coatue General Partner David Schneider. “We are proud to support Postman’s future plans and partner with them as they execute their vision to serve a rapidly expanding developer workforce and expand further into new roles and areas with plans for exciting future growth.”

What happened in the last year for the Postman community

The Postman community is leading the way in building the API-first world, and we’re empowering the community in every way that we can. Here are just a few examples from this year:

• We pivoted to all-virtual education and community events.
  • In February 2021, we held the largest API conference in the world, Postman Galaxy, with more than 26,000 registrations.
  • We launched Breaking Changes, a brand-new weekly online talk show where Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane hosts stellar guests from all across the API universe to discuss, debate, and solve the latest topics around APIs and API-first.
  • We launched Postman Intergalactic, a series of online educational trainings for every user type.
  • We launched The Exploratory, a new educational video series with highly requested Postman how-to content.
• We formalized the Postman Open Technologies program to support and lead the conversation around API specifications that are helping bring about the API-first world.
  • We joined the OpenAPI Initiative to participate in the education, marketing, and evolution of the OpenAPI Specification.
  • We joined forces with AsyncAPI to help define the future of APIs and accelerate the adoption of API-first principles to asynchronous APIs. The AsyncAPI specification also became a formal part of the Linux Foundation.
• Postman’s student programs continued to expand.
  • Earlier this month we held the inaugural Postman Student Summit, the world’s largest student-focused API event, with more than 6,000 registrations.
• We introduced Postman for Nonprofits, a program to support nonprofit organizations in the community with Postman plan discounts to aid in the pursuit of their missions. Participants in the program include the Mental Health Center of Denver, World Marrow Donor Day, Giving Compass, and more.

The entire team here at Postman shares a big, broad, enthusiastic vision for the API-first world, and we feel that we’re still in the early stages of executing on that vision. We continue seeking to hire people who want to build for the long term and meet Postman’s cultural values, which are:

• Create with curiosity
• Earn trust
• Embrace constraints
• Win together
• Own and deliver

If these values sound like your values, and you’d like to join us to help create the API-first world, please take a look at the Postman careers page.

And last but not least, on this important day, I want to personally thank our customers, our community, our investors, and everyone working here on the team at Postman. It’s an honor to be on this journey with you, and the future looks brighter than ever.