Meet Abhinav Asthana, small-town UP boy who turned his side project into Rs 46,000 crore business

The journey of Abhinav Asthana to building a billion-dollar company is one of the top success stories of the Indian startup ecosystem. From humble beginnings where was grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh like Basti and Lakhimpur. From getting his hands on a computer for the first time in Class 5 and earning his first paycheck as a teenager, Asthana is now the CEO of a $5.6 billion (over Rs 46,000) crore company. Abhinav is the face behind the globally renowned API platform Postman. His customers include the likes of Meta, Paypal, Microsoft, Twitter and Salesforce and developers who use it are sitting across the world, even in the remotest continent of Antarctica. 

Abhinav Asthana’s journey started from small towns in UP where he did his schooling before studying engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Goa campus. His father was a civil servant which kept the family moving between different towns as he was transferred. He first got his hands on a computer in Class 5 and credits that first machine as playing a crucial part in his journey as an entrepreneur. Even as a teenager, he made money by designing websites and his first earnings were in dollars. He even attempted to build a Yahoo clone but the project did not materialise. 

After building websites as a teenager, he founded a product called BITS360 in college. He started his career as an intern at Yahoo before helping build the company TeliportMe. However, he decided to quit his CTO job in 2013 after realising that it wasn’t what he was meant to do. Not wanting to go back to his father to pay his bills, he sustained through consulting projects. Meanwhile, Abhinav had started a side project called Postman in 2012. He soon realised its potential. In 2014, the company was formally started along with two founders Abhijit Kane who he knew from TeliportMe days and Ankit Sobti who he had met during Yahoo internship. 

The company grew quickly as the product gained popularity on Google Chrome Web Store. Customers increased and successive fundings took Abhinav Asthana’s side project to a billion-dollar company in just six years. The company had 20 million users in April 2022 and has bagged $433 million in funding till now. From humble beginnings of Basti and Lakhimpur, Asthana lives in San Francisco now. Postman’s investors include the likes of Nexus Venture Partners, CRV and Insight Partners.