SaaS Startups: India-born, US-focussed

Strong cloud-based enterprise software product companies are emerging in India, but are quickly moving to the US, drawn by customers, the ecosystem and the IPO dream

- HARICHANDAN ARAKALI

Postman started as a side project for Abhinav Asthana. He was the technical founder of an earlier startup after finishing college in India, and was grappling with the complexities of making disparate pieces of software connect with each other. The software that do that are called application programming interfaces (APIs) and they are becoming increasingly important to software development.

Eventually, the side project became the main interest, after an early piece of software that Asthana put up on the Chrome Web Store drew a lot of attention from software developers, and suggestions about features that could be added to it, and how it could be expanded. That gave birth to Postman in 2014, with backing from early stage investor Nexus Venture Partners.

By 2016, Postman had employees in the US, and Asthana himself moved to San Francisco in 2017. This year, Postman raised $150 million in its series C funding at a valuation of $2 billion.

Postman is one of a new generation of software product companies that started in India, but quickly moved to the US. Often they are companies that build software as a service (SaaS) for businesses. While they are building world-class software products and platforms, typically on the cloud, the move to the US is almost inevitable. Early-adopter customers are Americans, and the ecosystem of product development is still several years ahead in Silicon Valley.