What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #251

APIs + developer tools for the win 💪🏼: Postman and Apollo at combined $7.1B of value 🤯 - Postman's dev first flywheel

Aug 21

We’ve been hearing about the API economy for many years with companies like Stripe valued at almost $100B and Plaid at over $13.4B but what about the tools that developers use to create these APIs and manage and deliver them? This was another big week for developer tools and APIs in particular as Postman just raised a $225M round at a $5.6B valuation and Apollo raised a $130M round at a $1.5B valuation.

Speaking of Stripe and APIs, let’s start with Postman.

Abhinav Asthana @a85

Excited to announce that the Postman Public API Network (postman.com/explore) is the largest API hub in the world now! Huge thanks to incredible partners like @stripe @SalesforceDevs @CiscoDevNet @TwitterDev @microsoftgraph and many more! finance.yahoo.com/news/postman-p…

Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.

While companies like Okta, Twitter, and Shopify use Postman the 🔑 to success is Postman’s focus on starting with a developer first motion. See below for how the Postman flywheel works and how its serving over 17M developers now.

This flywheel is a work of art and one that any developer first company should use. Win the ❤️ and 🧠 of each individual developer who then shares with their team, then moves beyond the developers only to other cross functional teams, and 💥 enterprise deals!

There are now 17 million developers on the Postman API Platform, and the Postman app has been downloaded more than 60 million times so far.
Collaboration for teams: After recently announcing unlimited collaboration for small teams in Postman, we’re seeing record amounts of collaboration activity on the platform today.
Enterprise customers: We continue to add phenomenal customers like Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and more. You can read more on our case studies page.
The Public API Network: The Postman Public API Network recently became the world’s largest public API hub, and it has quickly grown to more than 20,000 public workspaces (from top organizations like Mercedes-Benz, Notion, Microsoft Graph, and more) that enable developers, teams, and companies around the world to work together on APIs at a scale that was never before possible.

Of note is the company was started in 2014 and notice the time between its Series A round in 2016 and Series B in 2019 - remember, it takes time to build a developer first community and evangelize and 🔑 is to build it the right way and not force top down sales too early.

Next up is Apollo which is the leader in GraphQL.

For those who don’t know what GraphQL is:

GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime for application programming interfaces (APIs) that prioritizes giving clients exactly the data they request and no more.
GraphQL is designed to make APIs fast, flexible, and developer-friendly. It can even be deployed within an integrated development environment (IDE) known as GraphiQL. As an alternative to REST, GraphQL lets developers construct requests that pull data from multiple data sources in a single API call.
Additionally, GraphQL gives API maintainers the flexibility to add or deprecate fields without impacting existing queries. Developers can build APIs with whatever methods they prefer, and the GraphQL specification will ensure they function in predictable ways to clients.

Apollo is “The leading open-source GraphQL implementation with 17M downloads per month and the only end-to-end cloud management solution for GraphQL.”

Also notice the time between funding rounds for its Series A and B (over 3 years!) and Series B and Series C (4 years!). It takes time to build a developer first company and sometimes a huge part of battle is not running out of 💰!!!

Of note is that Insight Partners is betting big on API developer tools as they led both rounds in Postman and Apollo!

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

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