Postman Acquires Akita Software to Help Build the Future of API Observability

Investment expands on vision of one API Platform to meet developers where they are in managing the entire API lifecycle

Postman, the world’s leading API Platform, announced it has acquired Akita Software, the company that makes monitoring and observing system behavior accessible for every developer. This is Postman’s first strategic acquisition since unveiling its vision of empowering 100 million software builders through APIs. Postman will integrate Akita’s API discovery and monitoring capabilities into its platform to deliver tooling to help organizations thrive in an API-first world.

“As Postman has scaled to larger customers, we have seen many enterprises lack insight into all of their APIs,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. “We share a belief with Akita that APIs are the future of software development, and its team has built a solution that allows organizations to bypass the unnecessary complexity that comes with traditional monitoring and observability solutions. We’re excited to welcome Akita to Postman and continue the evolution of the API Platform.”

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Akita was founded in 2018 and backed by lead investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, with additional investments from NBA champion Kevin Durant, renowned investor Elad Gil, and Harpoon Ventures. Akita automatically discovers and monitors APIs by watching API traffic, without requiring special frameworks or SDKs. Companies of any scale can quickly and easily gain greater visibility into their systems, without having to become experts in monitoring and observability. The entire Akita team will join Postman to continue its mission of building the future of API observability.

“I started Akita because I saw a huge need for helping software teams understand the production behavior of their own systems,” said Jean Yang, founder and CEO of Akita. “The rise of APIs has completely changed software development, and we need modern tools that meet developers where they are for building in this new world. We’re more motivated than ever to continue on this journey with Postman, as its team has taken what is arguably the most valuable thing in the modern software development ecosystem — the API call — and built the industry’s best platform around it.”

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Akita’s addition will make it easier than ever for users to manage their production APIs, even in the face of API sprawl. Managing too many APIs or microservices is a top obstacle to producing APIs, according to nearly one in four respondents in Postman’s 2023 State of the API Report, which surveyed over 40,000 professionals. At large enterprises, API sprawl is even worse: almost one in three respondents say it’s an obstacle. Akita’s capabilities for API discovery and monitoring make it possible to automatically manage APIs by simply allowing Akita’s agent to watch API traffic.

“The Flickr API has been a tool for developers and photo enthusiasts for over a decade, but to maintain and grow that legacy we need to understand how it’s used and how to improve it for developers,” said Alexander Seville, Head of Flickr. “Akita made it possible for us to quickly and easily track our APIs in use, even the parts run on legacy code. We were excited to use a product that was such a great fit for our site, and even more excited to see how it evolves as part of Postman!”