In the beginning there was a bad workflow. An API response arrived looking like a thicket. Documentation lived somewhere else. The latest version of an interface might reside in a colleague's memory, which is a fine storage system until that colleague goes to lunch. At Yahoo, Ankit Sobti and Abhinav Asthana learned the daily absurdity of asking software to speak to software while humans sprinted between desks to translate.
Postman grew out of that irritation. Asthana first built a Chrome extension to make API requests less miserable. Sobti, an engineer with experience at Yahoo and Adobe, joined him in turning the useful object into a company. Abhijit Kane joined them. The mythology of startups prefers a thunderclap; this story has something better: colleagues who liked building together, a product people kept adopting, and evidence that arrived before the grand plan.
One detail catches the light. Asthana has recalled taking a bus from Bangalore to Mumbai because a flight was beyond his budget. He hoped to stay with Sobti and work beside somebody he liked. No master plan was waiting at the destination. There was simply a promising tool, a friendship, and the suspicion that connected software should not be this annoying.
A technologist learns to look past the technology
Sobti's first professional education happened inside production systems. He spent two years at Yahoo and another year at Adobe, learning how software behaves when it must work for large numbers of people. At Yahoo he was named as an inventor on a patent concerning the relevance of web content. The work was technical, but it also introduced the theme that would follow him: useful systems must turn abundant information into something a person can act on.
Then he went to the Indian School of Business. In a candid alumni interview, Sobti described arriving with a narrowly technical bent. Business school made the frame wider. He had once been attracted to a decision because the engineering was complicated; afterward, he said, he considered product, marketing, and strategy too. This sounds sensible enough to fit on a management slide. For an engineer, it can feel closer to learning that gravity operates sideways.
Meanwhile, Postman was making its own argument. Sobti remembered roughly 100 users when he entered ISB and 50,000 by the time he graduated. Those people were not responding to a campaign. They were responding to relief. The tool removed friction from a task developers repeated all day, then let their work become reusable. A request could become a collection. A collection could become a shared reference. Context stopped evaporating at the edge of a desk.
After ISB, Sobti led the real-time bidding business at Media.net. He has said that the team turned around a lagging part of the business in less than a year. The experience placed him between code and consequence, the country where a future CTO spends most of his time. In September 2014, he and his co-founders left their other jobs to work on Postman full time.
Eight people, a million users, and no tidy job description
Early Postman compressed an entire company into a small room. When the team numbered fewer than ten, Sobti's days stretched across product management, development, strategy, recruitment, customer support, writing, and marketing. He compared the intensity to reliving his first terms at business school. It is hard to maintain a narrow theory of leadership when a support ticket, a hiring decision, and an architectural choice all arrive before lunch.
The product also expanded. What began as a friendlier way to make an API request became a place to test, document, mock, monitor, and share APIs. Team libraries and workspaces recognized that the difficult part was rarely the request alone. The difficult part was preserving the intent around it: which interface is current, who owns it, what a change will break, and whether the next developer can find the answer without staging an archaeological dig.
Recognition followed. Forbes India included Sobti, Asthana, and Kane in its 30 Under 30 class in 2016. Fortune India placed the trio on its 40 Under 40 list in 2018. In 2021, Postman raised $225 million at a $5.6 billion valuation. Such numbers are the business press's preferred unit of drama. Sobti's more revealing unit may be the user. He described scale as a rush and an intimidation: a decision made by a small team could alter the daily work of 1.5 million developers, and indirectly many more.
His public ambitions were similarly expansive but specific. He wanted APIs treated as products, rather than plumbing that happened to function. He imagined data moving more freely instead of remaining trapped inside platforms. He also disliked the surprise people expressed when they learned Postman began in Bangalore. In 2015, he said he wanted to encourage more product companies from India. The point was not patriotic decoration. It was that place of origin should not determine the imagined radius of a product.
When the developer calling the API is an agent
Sobti now appears publicly as Postman's field CTO. The title suggests a useful migration. The chief technologist is not only inside the engine room; he is outside, where customers discover that clean diagrams have met actual organizations. His recent writing circles forward-deployed engineering, quality in an AI-accelerated world, and the infrastructure required for agents to do dependable work.
His sharpest phrase is also his driest: “AI always demos well.” A demonstration has polite data, a prepared route, and an audience disposed to applaud. A company has seventeen payment APIs, uncertain ownership, inconsistent descriptions, permissions that grew like ivy, and judgments nobody thought to document. An agent can produce a plausible answer while being operationally wrong. Plausibility is charming at a dinner party. In production, it gets a ticket number.
{
"capability": "what can be done",
"context": "which tool is canonical",
"permission": "what may be done",
"outcome": "how success is judged"
}
This is where Postman's old problem returns in a new costume. Human developers needed APIs they could discover, inspect, test, and trust. Agents need those things with greater precision and less tolerance for the helpful shrug. They also need semantic context, controlled credentials, observable behavior, and a way to distinguish the canonical interface from the dusty one someone forgot to retire.
At POST/CON 25, Sobti joined leaders from AWS, Meta, and Decagon to discuss what the event called the messy middle of AI. The phrase suits him. His work has often occupied the middle: between two software systems, between an engineer and a business decision, between a fast-moving tool and the enterprise that must govern it. The middle is where clean abstractions get fingerprints.
Engineering roles at Yahoo and Adobe, plus work on a web-content relevance patent.
An MBA at ISB, an operating role at Media.net, and explosive organic adoption for Postman.
Postman grows from a small team into a global API company and raises a $225 million Series D.
As field CTO, Sobti focuses on enterprise APIs, AI agents, context, governance, and reliable execution.
Warmth, independent thought, and a piano nearby
Technical careers can flatten a person into nouns: founder, engineer, executive. The stray details restore dimension. Postman's official biography lists Sobti as a Chelsea supporter who loves his piano, books, beers, and bacon. A conference biography adds Neutral Milk Hotel to the shelf. In a 2021 livestream, he discussed using Postman to automate meal plans for Cooper, the company's Chief Happiness Officer. Even API infrastructure occasionally comes down to dinner.
His account of his father supplies a more serious coordinate. Sobti has described watching him rise from a middle-class background to become a director at BHEL without compromising drive or integrity. He called his father his largest source of inspiration. A LinkedIn recommendation offers an outside view, describing Sobti as an independent thinker and one of the warmest people the writer knew. Those qualities are not contradictory. Good collaboration requires a person capable of holding a position without treating disagreement as a blood sport.
The arc from Postman's first hundred users to today's AI-agent work can look like a succession of technology fashions. Look closer and it is one durable question. How can a capability travel between systems without losing its meaning? For a human developer, the answer included a clear request, a shared collection, and documentation that stayed close to the work. For an enterprise agent, it includes a catalog, permissions, context, and a measurable outcome.
Sobti has spent his career enlarging that answer. He began with code, added product and strategy, then organization and governance. The APIs still carry the messages. The interesting work is making sure everyone, flesh or silicon, understands what they mean.