In 1997, in the small town of Basti in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a boy in Class 5 sat down at a computer for the first time.
Abhinav Asthana has recalled that the machine came into the house because his father, who worked as an engineer, bought one and taught himself to program. The family moved from Basti to Lakhimpur near the Nepal border, following the postings that came with a government career. The computer stayed constant.
Working with Yahoo's internal APIs was painful, and he has said the frustration led to Postman.
As a teenager he designed websites for pay, and his first earnings arrived in dollars. He once tried to build a Yahoo clone. It never worked. He went on to BITS Pilani's Goa campus, ran a site called BITS 360 for entrance aspirants, and interned at Yahoo in Bengaluru around 2009.
That internship is where the story begins. Working with Yahoo's internal APIs was painful, and he has said the frustration led to Postman. In 2012 he built it as a side project, a free Chrome extension that let developers test APIs. He did no marketing. By the time Postman became a company, about half a million people were using it.
Nobody asked him to build it, and nobody paid him for it. The decision to commit was not instant. Asthana left his CTO job at a startup called TeliportMe in 2013, and rather than ask his father for money, he lived on consulting projects. In 2014 he formally founded Postman with Abhijit Kane, whom he knew from TeliportMe, and Ankit Sobti, whom he had met at Yahoo. A $1 million seed from Nexus Venture Partners followed in May 2015. In 2017 the company moved its headquarters to San Francisco.
The curve that came after was steep. A 2020 round put Postman past $2 billion. In August 2021 a $225 million Series D valued it at $5.6 billion. By April 2022 it reported around 20 million users, and later versions added AI features, including a rebuilt platform in March 2026 and the acquisition of liblab in November 2025.
Postman has not reported a newer valuation since 2021, and revenue figures remain unconfirmed.
The company's customers now include names like Meta, PayPal, Microsoft and Salesforce, and Asthana lives in San Francisco, a long way from the Basti house with the first computer.
The pattern is worth keeping. Asthana did not start with a company. He started with a tool for his own irritation, gave it away, and let the users prove demand before he asked anyone for money.