Bangalore-based startup Postman, which offers a platform for teams developing APIs, has raised $1 Mn seed round funding from Nexus Venture Partners. The company will use the funds raised for setting up an office in San Francisco this year. The company also has plans to use the funds raised for hiring, although Abhinav Asthana CEO and co-founder stressed that Postman wants to maintain a small team.
Founded in 2014 by Abhinav Asthana, Abhijit Kane and Ankit Sobti, Postman helps developers and companies supercharge their API workflow. It’s extension on Chrome is the most efficient way to test, develop and document APIs. It also helps to create complex requests, go back in time and view results easily. Currently, Postman has more than 80 features which helps in every step.
Like any cloud-based software service, Postman does have a news feed for providing updates for the ongoing development of an API, and it syncs data directly to the cloud.
Asthana explained about the application saying “We would go back and forth over API production and development, as a result, it took a lot of time to ship the product. You are building out an API that isn’t documented properly, and you don’t have time to do it.”
Postman’s service is currently available as a Chrome app and has more than 1.5 Mn developers who have registered for the service, while more than 800,000 are active. The user base is global too, as over half of them are located in the U.S., including members of major tech companies like Box, Microsoft and Cisco.
Asthana said, “It helps root out bugs and avoids making changes that screw up an API – and thus bring a service or app to its knees when live. We’re looking to change the way people work with APIs. The biggest problem with APIs is that things are changed and undocumented, then are pushed out and break. We want to end that.”
A limited version of the service is available for free and the complete Postman Sync service costs $49 per month with up to 10 developers. The startup is also aiming to convert 5% of free users to paying members by the idea of providing flexible payment options for organizations with larger needs.
Asthana also said that Postman is currently working on improving Sync, its collaboration platform. Once this is done, it will begin developing mobile apps that might be considered if there’s sufficient demand and then might also work on development of system integrations.
Asthana has also co-founded panoramic photo app TeleportMe in 2010.
