SaaS startup Postman has raised $225 million at a post-money valuation of $5.6 billion, thus overtaking BrowserStack as India’s most valued software-as-a-service enterprise.
The San Francisco- and Bengaluru-headquartered company has seen its valuation jump 180% since last year when it raised $150 million from Insight Partners. ET was the first to break the news of that fundraise.
The investors: Existing investor Insight Partners led the latest fundraise as well, which saw participation of new backers Coatue Management, Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital and Battery Ventures.
Bond Capital is now a common investor in both BrowserStack and Postman.
Their rival and Indian SaaS posterboy Freshworks is valued at $3.5 billion. It is currently drawing up plans to list in the US.
The company: Founded in 2014 by Abhinav Asthana, Abhijit Kane and Ankit Sobti in Bengaluru, Postman creates application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable interactions between apps as well as functionalities within apps. It has around 17 million users and 500,000 organisations on its platform.
Postman added more than 300 employees across 13 countries since the beginning of last year, more than doubling its headcount.
About 98% of Fortune 500 firms and the likes of Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and Microsoft are among its customers.
Postman was among the top five nominees in the 'Startup of the Year' category at The Economic Times Startup Awards 2020.
The company plans to use the new capital to expand its team spread across sales, marketing, product, and engineering. It will also invest in its community of developers across the globe, support students through its API literacy programmes, and contribute towards open-source projects for a stronger API ecosystem.
The SaaS gold rush: The new investment comes at a time when Indian SaaS startups are seeing increased investor interest.
On June 8, ET reported that Zenoti has raised $80 million in a funding round led by US-based private equity firm TPG, at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.
On June 17, BrowserStack raised $200 million in a funding round led by Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, valuing the company at $4 billion.
On the same day, ET reported that SoftBank Vision Fund is set to invest $100 million in Mindtickle, turning the SaaS startup into a unicorn.
According to a Bain & Co. report last December, revenues of Indian SaaS companies are expected to touch $18-$20 billion by 2022, doubling their share in the global market to around 7-9%.
Read More at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/newsletters/tech-top-5/a-new-indian-saas-leader/articleshow/85431713.cms