Software as a Service (SaaS) company Postman is in advanced talks with New York-based investment fund Insight Partners to raise around $150 million at a valuation of $2 billion, two people in the know of the deal details said.
Postman is a collaboration platform for managing, developing and testing application programme interfaces (APIs). APIs are a set of tools for building applications used by software developers.
Postman, among the buzziest Indian SaaS companies, was valued at $350 million just a year ago, and if the deal goes through it will be one of the biggest jumps in valuation for an Indian startup, catapulting the company into the growing Indian SaaS unicorn club comprising Freshworks, Druva and Icertis.
“The company is in final talks to close new financing which is going to take its valuation to $2 billion, that is a massive bump up from its previous round..,” said a person in the know on condition of anonymity as the talks are private.
Postman and Insight Partners did not respond to ET’s detailed query till press time on Friday.
The company previously picked up $50 million in its Series B funding round, led by San Francisco-based venture capital investor Charles River Ventures in June 2019.
Venture capital fund Nexus Venture Partners cut Postman’s first institutional cheque of $1 million and then followed it up with a $7 million Series A investment.
The Bengaluru and San Francisco-based firm counts Microsoft, Twitter, PayPal and DocuSign as customers and said it had crossed the 10 million user milestone in February this year, adding over 3 million developers on its platform in less than a year. The company claims it has users from across 500,000 organisations as customers.
Insight Partners, which boasts of $30 billion in capital commitments, has previously backed Indian firms like BharatPe, a QR code-based payments startup and Chargebee, a subscription billing platform.
An investor in microblogging platform Twitter and e-commerce software firm Shopify, among a string of other enterprise software companies, Insight raised a $9.5 billion fund in April, its largest growth equity corpus to back startups in the consumer and enterprise segment.
The fund ploughs anywhere between $10 million and $350 million across stages.
“With a focus on the enterprise software sector, for Insight the investment in Postman fits in well with its overall theme…,” said another person aware of the development.
Postman was founded in 2014 by Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti after the duo realised it was extremely difficult to keep track of API updates. Back then, they made the product available to users as a plugin on the Google Chrome Web Store, but quickly moved to found Postman and started selling the service.
Insight’s talks for an investment in Postman come at a time when Indian SaaS firms are improving their standing as value creators, with a growing number of large funds like Tiger Global backing several firms in this space.
According to SaaSBOOMi, which is a community for SaaS companies in India, India’s SaaS industry clocked $1.5 billion in revenues in 2019, and is expected to grow to $10 billion by 2025. In that time, India is expected to grow from controlling a 2.6% share of the global SaaS market to 8%.
Other fast-growing Indian SaaS firms with sizeable valuations include CleverTap, which raised $35 million led by Sequoia Capital in October last year; SirionLabs, which raised $44 million led by Tiger Global and Avatar Growth Capital in May this year, and MindTickle, which raised $40 million led by Norwest Venture Partners in July last year.
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