Abhijit Kane

Building the Plumbing of the Modern Internet

Every time a developer hits "Send" in Postman - testing an endpoint, debugging a response, wiring up a third-party service - Abhijit Kane's fingerprints are on that moment. He is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of the company that turned API development from a frustrating solo endeavor into something closer to collaborative sport. Twenty million developers worldwide use the tool his team built. Ninety-eight percent of Fortune 500 companies depend on it. He still lives in New Delhi.

The origin story has the cadence of a good founding myth, except it actually happened. In 2012, Abhinav Asthana - a developer in Bangalore - built a Chrome extension to make testing APIs less painful. He posted it on Stack Overflow. Millions of developers downloaded it. By 2014, the project had outgrown its creator. Asthana called his BITS Pilani classmates Abhijit Kane and Ankit Sobti and said: this thing is real, let's build the company. Kane was at WalmartLabs. He quit. They incorporated in April 2014.

What they were building was genuinely non-obvious at the time. APIs were infrastructure, not product. The people who cared were engineers, not executives. The market was enormous and mostly invisible. Kane's insight - alongside his co-founders - was that APIs needed what code had already gotten: version control, collaboration, shared workspaces. "We wanted to be the Google Docs or GitHub for APIs," he has said, "where developers could work on a series of code files." The metaphor still undersells it.

Before the Billion-Dollar Platform

The resume before Postman reads like a deliberate warm-up. A 2012 internship at Adobe building a font recognition app for phones. A 2013 stint at VMware creating internal dashboards. A year at WalmartLabs as a software engineer, working in the industrial-scale engineering environment of one of the world's largest retailers. These were not accidents - each gave Kane something to bring back: user-facing product thinking, enterprise tooling instincts, and an understanding of what it looks like when software has to work at scale.

He had started computing in 1996. As a kid, access to a keyboard was restricted - so he found ways around it. That particular stubbornness, the kind that treats a locked system as an interesting puzzle rather than a dead end, would prove useful later. When he qualified for IIT - one of India's most competitive academic bottlenecks - he declined, choosing instead the dual-degree Computer Science and Economics program at BITS Pilani. The school that would eventually produce all three Postman co-founders.

The Challenge of Enormous Scale

By September 2015, Postman had 600,000 users. That number sounds like a success story. Kane has described it as the first serious crisis. "One of the first challenges was that we were dealing with a huge user-base. The second thing is just the overwhelming amount of information that you have to juggle in your head, at all times." This is the part that does not make it into the launch announcements: product leadership at scale means knowing which of ten thousand signals actually matters. Kane learned this under live fire.

The funding trajectory - seed, Series A, a $150M Series C in 2020 bringing the valuation to $2 billion, then the landmark $225M Series D in August 2021 at $5.6 billion - tells the external story. The internal one is about hiring, product sequencing, and the specific discipline required to build for developers without losing the simplicity that made millions of them choose Postman in the first place. "Once you hit revenue," Kane has observed, "there is no way you can survive as a product without the leadership team being good."

The platform today spans API design, development, documentation, testing, monitoring, and mocking - the full lifecycle. It integrates with GitHub, Jira, Slack, and dozens of other enterprise tools. The Postman API Network - a public directory of APIs - is one of the largest in the world. None of this is the Chrome extension Asthana posted on Stack Overflow. All of it traces back to the same core insight: developers need a shared workspace, not just a tool.

The Product Philosophy

Kane tends not to court the press. The Postman story is usually told through the lens of CEO Abhinav Asthana, who is more publicly prominent. Kane's contributions show up differently - in product decisions, in the architecture of the Postman workspace, in the classroom program he helped build that put API training in front of 4,000+ students at his own alma mater. His GitHub repositories offer a glimpse into the range of a developer who built augmented reality tennis games in C++ as a student and then spent a decade thinking about how to make every other developer's life more productive.

The Postman Classroom Program, which Kane has been involved with, is a telling detail. He did not just build the tool; he invested in the ecosystem that would grow the next generation of developers who would eventually use it. There is a certain long game logic to this - and it is consistent with someone who chose a five-year dual degree over the faster IIT path, and who spent a year at WalmartLabs learning retail-scale engineering before joining a startup.

"There are always things you are yet to explore," Kane has said, "whether you are a startup or a Microsoft." This is not inspiration-poster philosophy. It is a specific claim about the nature of product work: the problems do not stop getting interesting just because the company gets big. Two hundred thousand organizations and twenty million developers later, Postman is still, in Kane's framing, a platform with territory left to map.