In 2012, while working as a software engineer in Bengaluru, Abhinav Asthana was consumed by immense frustration. Every time his engineering team wanted to test an application programming interface (API), they were forced to write tedious command-line scripts, maintain chaotic spreadsheets of documentation, and decipher cryptic HTTP error codes. Over a single weekend, Abhinav wrote a lightweight Chrome browser extension to solve his own problem. Today, Postman is valued at over $5.6 Billion, used by over 30 million developers across 98% of Fortune 500 corporations worldwide.
Act I: BITS Pilani and The Open-Source Bug
A computer science graduate from BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, Abhinav was an ardent open-source enthusiast who interned at Yahoo and co-founded an early digital media technology company, T ัะฒะตั (Teliportme). While building web applications, Abhinav realized that software architecture was shifting: monolithic codebases were being broken down into distributed microservices connected through APIs, yet the tools to test these APIs were primitive and broken.
Act II: The Weekend Hack That Went Viral
In 2012, sitting in his apartment, Abhinav coded a basic Chrome extension named Postman to simplify sending HTTP requests and visualizing JSON responses. He uploaded the tool to the Google Chrome Web Store completely free. Within weeks, without spending a single rupee on marketing, thousands of engineers from Microsoft, Google, PayPal, and Netflix were downloading Postman, praising it on GitHub and Twitter for saving them countless hours of manual debugging.
Act III: Founding Postman with Ankit & Abhijit
In 2014, recognizing that Postman was evolving into an indispensable global utility, Abhinav teamed up with BITS alumni Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane to incorporate Postman in Bengaluru. Rather than building heavy sales teams, Postman pioneered the ultimate bottom-up, developer-first product-led growth (PLG) playbook: individual developers fell in love with the tool, evangelized it inside their companies, and eventually enterprise CTOs had to purchase enterprise team licenses to support their workflows.
Act IV: Nexus, Insight & The Enterprise SaaS Ascent
Recognizing the foundational power of developer infrastructure, Nexus Venture Partners led Postmanโs early institutional rounds, followed by Silicon Valley giants Insight Partners and CRV. Postman expanded from a simple REST client into a complete API Collaboration Platform: supporting GraphQL, WebSockets, automated mock servers, API documentation generators, security compliance scanning, and CI/CD integrations.
Act V: The San Francisco & Bengaluru Dual Powerhouse
Establishing corporate headquarters in San Francisco while maintaining massive engineering teams in Bengaluru, Abhinav proved that Indian developer infrastructure could become the global gold standard. Postman created the Public API Networkโthe worldโs largest searchable repository of public APIs, functioning as the GitHub of the API economy.
Act VI: Angel Investor in Open-Source Infrastructure
Having scaled one of the world's most successful developer platforms, Abhinav actively allocates personal capital to support fellow technical founders. He has backed premier open-source infrastructure startups including Devtron and SigNoz, mentoring founders on building thriving developer communities.
Act VII: Industry Transformation & Strategic Legacy
- Defined the API-First Movement: Standardized how the entire global software engineering community builds, tests, and documents microservice APIs.
- Product-Led Growth Benchmark: Scaled to 30 million global users and $5.6B valuation purely through organic bottom-up developer love.
- Pioneered Global Indian Deep-Tech: Shattered the perception that Indian founders only build domestic B2C apps, creating a dominant global developer platform.
