Postman, Inc.
Leadership History
3 leaders · 2014 to present
Abhinav Asthana is the CEO of Postman, in the role since 2014.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abhinav Asthana | Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder | 2014 | Present | 12 |
| Ankit Sobti | Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder | 2014 | Present | 12 |
| Abhijit Kane | Co-Founder | 2014 | Present | 12 |
Postman is the API tool many developers open first when they need to call, test or share an API. It grew from a Chrome app into a platform with workspaces, collections, mock servers, monitors, API governance, Flows (a visual workflow builder) and AI features. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with large engineering operations in Bengaluru and an office in Tokyo. Its three co-founders still run it, with Abhinav Asthana as CEO and Ankit Sobti as CTO. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Postman was founded in 2014 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane to eliminate API development headaches, expanding into the world's ubiquitous collaborative API development platform dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Bengaluru.
Postman makes money from subscriptions. The free plan gets developers in the door; since March 1, 2026 it supports a single user, so teams that share workspaces must pay. Paid plans are Solo (about $9 per month for individuals who want more AI credits and automation), Team (from about $19 per user per month, replacing the old Basic plan) and Enterprise (custom contracts with SSO, SCIM, audit logs, API Catalog, governance and private API networks). On top of seats, Postman sells usage: AI credits beyond plan allowances are billed pay-as-you-go, and monitors, mock calls and other automation have plan limits. The bottom-up pattern is typical of product-led growth: individual engineers adopt the tool, teams standardize on it, and the company later signs an enterprise agreement. Postman does not disclose how revenue splits across these lines.
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
2014 – Present
12 years (current)
Moved headquarters to San Francisco in 2017; rebuilt the product as native apps after Chrome Apps were phased out; acquired Akita, Orbit, liblab and Fern; launched the AI-native platform, new pricing and Fabric Gateway in 2026.
Created Postman in 2012, has led the company since incorporation, and raised about $433 million including the 2021 Series D at a $5.6 billion valuation.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
2014 – Present
12 years (current)
Sobti built the core backend infrastructure that allowed Postman to seamlessly transition from a simple Chrome extension into a massive, cloud-based collaborative platform.
As Co-Founder and CTO, he manages the global engineering teams responsible for maintaining the high availability of the API network used by over 30 million developers.
Co-Founder
2014 – Present
12 years (current)
Kane designed the original, highly intuitive user interface that made testing complex APIs incredibly simple for non-backend developers, fueling Postman's early viral growth.
As Co-Founder, he established the core product design philosophy that kept Postman accessible even as it expanded into highly complex enterprise testing and mocking.
Postman's main challenges are developer goodwill and competition from lighter tools. The March 2026 move to a one-user free plan drew criticism from small teams and pushed some toward Git-based or local-first alternatives such as Bruno, Hoppscotch, Insomnia (Kong) and Apidog, repeating the backlash from the 2023 Scratch Pad sunset. Microsoft's VS Code and GitHub Copilot keep pulling API testing into the editor. Postman also has to prove it can sell beyond testing, into API catalogs, SDK generation and AI gateways, where Kong, Google Apigee, MuleSoft and cloud providers are established. As a private company whose last priced round was in 2021, its current valuation is untested.
Abhinav Asthana, Postman's co-founder, has been CEO since the company was formed in 2014. He built the original Postman Chrome app in 2012 while working at Yahoo in Bengaluru.
Co-founder Ankit Sobti is Postman's Chief Technology Officer.
Abhijit Kane is the third co-founder of Postman and remains part of its founding leadership.
He studied at BITS Pilani and worked as a software engineer at Yahoo in Bengaluru, where he built Postman as a side project.
Moving headquarters to San Francisco in 2017, raising the 2021 Series D at $5.6 billion, acquiring Akita, Orbit, liblab and Fern, and in 2026 rebuilding the platform, changing pricing and launching Fabric Gateway.
In September 2026 he said agentic AI has turned being API-first into a mandate, and that enterprises need infrastructure governing what agents can discover, access and do.
In 2012, while working as a software engineer in Bengaluru, Abhinav Asthana grew exhausted by the cumbersome process of manually copying API endpoints and writing test scripts. Over a single weekend, he coded a basic HTTP request tool for Google Chrome, shared it on GitHub, and saw it downloaded by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide.
After proving viral product-led growth in Bengaluru, Asthana established corporate and commercial headquarters in San Francisco in 2017 to interface with Silicon Valley enterprise buyers, while keeping major engineering, product, and developer relations hubs in Bengaluru.
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