Postman secures $225 mn to become most valuable Indian SaaS unicorn

A little over a year after making its entry into the unicorn club, application programme interface (API) development platform, Postman, on Tuesday said it has raised $225 million as a part of its Series D round, led by existing investor, New York-based global venture capital firm Insight Partners.

With the latest fundraise, Postman’s valuation has seen almost a three-fold jump from $2 billion earlier to $5.6 billion now.  This makes Postman the highest valued software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, in India’s unicorn stable, overtaking the likes of Browserstack ($4 billion), Freshworks ($3.5 billion) and Icertis ($2.8 billion).  

New investors Coatue Management LLC, Battery Ventures, and BOND, along with existing investors CRV and Nexus Venture Partners also participated, as a part of this round.  The round also saw investments from DoorDash’s product leader,Gokul Rajaram; and Freshworks’ founder Girish Mathrubootham. 

Post the Series D round, the company has raised more than $430 million, till date. 

Postman’s latest funding signals the trend around global investors flocking behind established players in various sectors, giving them a raise in their valuations.  

Over the course of this year, companies like DailyHunt, Infra.Market, Cred, and Digit have more than doubled their valuations within months of raising their previous round. 

According to the Postman, the new raise will help it expand its team in areas of sales, marketing, product and engineering.  The company will also continue to invest in its community of developers across the globe, support students through innovative API literacy programs, and contribute toward open source projects to foster a strong and thriving API ecosystem.

It raised $150 million as a part of its Series C investment in June, last year, at a valuation of $2 billion. 

“We are thrilled to have the support of our community and customers who continue to propel us forward, and this new round of funding will help Postman dramatically increase the speed of that forward motion. We’re committed to helping developers who are building the future with APIs,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Postman. 

The seven-year old startup is an enterprise SaaS collaboration platform for API development, which helps stakeholders including product management, developer operations and engineering to collaborate to accelerate the software development process.

At present, Postman has more than 17 million users and 500,000 organizations on its platform. 

“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. Postman has the opportunity to become a key pillar of how enterprises build, deliver products, and seamlessly enable partnerships across the ecosystem,” said Jeff Horing, managing director, Insight Partners. 

According to Postman, it  has added more than doubled its headcount to 300 employees across 13 countries since the beginning of 2020. 

Its customers include the likes of Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and Microsoft. 

"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 David Schneider, general partner, Coatue. 

India, at present, has close to 10 SaaS unicorns, with --- software testing platform, BrowserStack; subscription billion solution, Chargebee; HR training software, MindTickle and healthcare analytics platform, Innovacer -- entering India’s unicorn club, this year.