Abhinav Asthana first used a computer in Class 5, around 1997, in Basti, Uttar Pradesh. His father, a civil engineer, had bought one and taught himself to program. The family later moved to Lakhimpur.
As a teenager he designed websites and was paid in dollars. He studied at BITS Pilani Goa and interned at Yahoo in Bengaluru around 2009. Working with Yahoo's internal APIs was painful, and that led him to build Postman in 2012 as a free Chrome extension.
He left his CTO job at TeliportMe in 2013 and lived on consulting projects. Postman was formally founded on 1 October 2014 with Abhijit Kane and Ankit Sobti. A 1 million dollar seed from Nexus Venture Partners followed in May 2015, and the headquarters moved to San Francisco in 2017.
A round in June 2020 valued Postman above 2 billion dollars. In August 2021 a 225 million dollar Series D valued it at 5.6 billion dollars. It reported about 20 million users in April 2022 and rebuilt its platform for AI in March 2026.