Abhinav Asthana built a browser side project during an internship, and 33 million developers still open it every day

Basti is a small city in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and it is not where the software industry looks for its founders. Abhinav Asthana grew up there with a Pentium I and a father who taught him to program, which is the sort of detail that sounds like color until you notice how much of the rest of the story it explains. He went to BITS Pilani, graduated in 2010, and took an internship at Yahoo!'s Bangalore office, where he ran into the least glamorous problem in software: testing an API meant retyping the same HTTP request over and over into a terminal, forever.

So he built a small tool to stop doing that. It ran inside Chrome, it had a text box and a Send button, and he called it Postman because it delivered POST requests, which is the kind of joke you make at 1am when nobody is going to see it. He put it on the Chrome Web Store for free, largely because he had no other plan for it. Within weeks it was spreading through engineering teams by word of mouth, one developer showing another, which remains the only distribution channel that has ever really worked for developer tools.

The gap between a hack and a company

This is the duality worth sitting with. Postman spent years as a beloved free utility, the thing in your bookmarks bar, not a line item on anyone's budget, before it was a company at all. The hard part of Abhinav's career was not writing the extension. It was the much less romantic work of turning a browser toy into infrastructure that enterprises would pay for and stake their release cycles on.

That started in late 2014, when he incorporated in Bangalore with Abhijit Kane and Ankit Sobti and the three of them set about rebuilding the thing properly: collections, environments, mock servers, monitoring, team workspaces, governance, an API design surface. Postman stopped being a request tester and became the place where an organization's APIs live. By 2020 it was worth $2 billion. In August 2021 a $225 million Series D put it at $5.6 billion. The user count crossed 33 million developers, which makes it one of the most widely adopted pieces of software any Indian founder has ever shipped.

The lesson he keeps repeating, and the reason he is on this site: the tool was free and useful for years before it was a business, and it worked because of that order, not in spite of it.

The next request

The obvious question for a company built on humans clicking Send is what happens when the humans stop clicking. Abhinav's answer is Orbit, launched this year, an API for coding agents, letting them discover public APIs, evaluate whether one actually fits, and integrate it without a person in the loop. It is a company deliberately building the thing that makes its original interface unnecessary, which is a rarer instinct than it sounds.

If you want the founder-story version, look up his talks on the Basti-to-Bangalore-to-San-Francisco path; he tells it without any of the usual polish. If you want the useful version, go read how Postman handled the decade between free extension and enterprise standard. That middle stretch is where the actual company was built, and it is the part nobody puts on a slide.

It was a side project. I put it on the Chrome Web Store for free because I didn't know what else to do with it.

Abhinav, on the origin of a tool that now has a nine-figure funding history