DEVOPSdigest

Postman announced its acquisition of Orbit, the community growth platform for developer companies.

Over the past four years, Orbit has helped the leading developer companies grow their communities, and will now integrate its technology and deploy its expertise in support of Postman’s vision of empowering 100 million developers through API collaboration.

“Tens of thousands of API builders including companies like Discord already distribute their APIs to millions of developers on the Postman API Network. But today, those builders can’t engage directly with their community on the network,” said Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman. “We can show them how many developers call their APIs along with success rates, which is only part of the experience. With Orbit, we'll open up the conversation between API builders and developers, allowing developers to tell API builders what they need, and enabling API builders to reach new audiences.”

Orbit was founded in 2019 and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Heavybit, and many others. Orbit helps leading developer companies manage and grow their communities across forums, chat platforms, social channels, and more, providing insights, automations, and engagement capabilities.

“We created Orbit to help companies understand and grow their communities, on the idea that larger and healthier communities ultimately lead to broader adoption of software,” said Patrick Woods, co-founder and CEO of Orbit. “After getting to know the Postman team and platform, we realized that Postman is the single biggest developer community-building opportunity on the planet right now, so naturally it's been exciting to join forces.”

At Postman, the Orbit team will build community features into Postman’s API Network to help create and scale connections between API builders and the developers that rely on them. For API builders, this means growth of their developer communities, increased API adoption, and feedback from their most engaged users. For developers, it means more robust discovery and decision-making about their API choices, helping them build software faster and with more confidence.

“As we expand the capabilities of the Postman API Network, it will become a primary channel for growth and distribution for API builders. And for developers, it’ll be the first place they turn to for finding, evaluating, and deploying APIs. Bringing in the Orbit team is an important step on that journey,” said Asthana.