Postman Inc., the well-funded startup that’s recognized as an industry leader in application programming interface development, says it’s getting into the business of developing artificial intelligence agents.

The company says its new AI Agent Builder tool empowers companies to combine large language models with APIs and workflows to design, test and deploy intelligent AI-powered applications quickly.

AI agents are more advanced algorithms that leverage generative AI models to perform complex tasks on behalf of users with minimal supervision. They’re one of the hottest trends in AI development right now, and they’re something that Postman says it can simplify.

The startup explains that it provides centralized access to APIs from more than 18,000 companies, enabling it to feed vast amounts of data to AI agents quickly. Add to that, it offers a no-code modular development environment called Postman Flows and integrated testing. These can all be combined to accelerate the AI agent development process, the company says.

Postman provides collaboration tools that help companies build APIs, which are the main channels through which applications interact with one another. They’re used to transfer information, for example when an analytics tool needs to access records from a database, to provision cloud infrastructure and automate business tasks.

The company believes the emergence of agentic AI will bring about a shift in the way new software is developed and operated, citing data from Deloitte Touche Ltd., which suggests half of all companies will have some kind of AI agent up and running by 2027.

According to Postman, this shift is analogous to the rise of mobile applications. Initially, the first mobile apps were all quite simple and disconnected from broader services. But over time, those apps became tightly integrated with cloud services, transforming their utility and helping to make smartphones a tool that few can live without.

Postman thinks agentic AI has the same potential to transform organizational productivity, and that explains why it wants to play a role in its development. It adds that combining AI services with an API-driven architecture will lead to more adaptive automations that can better understand context, make decisions for users and solve problems dynamically.

Postman says its AI Agent Builder can help to make all of this achievable, and sees it becoming a standardized way for companies to build, test and deploy AI agents in one location.

Most importantly, it provides developers with a centralized platform for large language model and API discovery, so they can easily search for and integrate two of the key components of AI agents at their fingertips. Users can select from more than 18,000 verified APIs within its catalog, or build their own private APIs using the Postman platform.

It also integrates with the Postman Collection Runner Client and Flows tools for developers to test LLM responses, prompts and inputs. The Postman Flows tool acts as a visual canvas for AI agent building, eliminating the coding tasks required for API integration.

What’s more, Postman says, its APIs are all ready to use out of the box, so there’s no need to rewrite any boilerplate code to integrate them with the developer’s preferred development environment.

Postman founder and Chief Executive Abhinav Asthana says APIs are already one of the foundational building blocks for generative AI software applications.

“As AI agents gain traction, we could see a 10- to 100-times increase in API utility, enabling software systems to execute increasingly complex workflows,” he insisted. “Eventually humans will have the option to remove themselves or hand off certain workflows, allowing agents to automate processes — so long as the agents are built with the proper guardrails.”

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