Postman Inc., creator of the popular application programming interface development environment of the same name, is looking to build up some steam after landing a $50 million funding round led by Charles River Ventures.

Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the Series B round, which brings its total amount raised to date to $57 million.

Postman sells what it calls a “collaboration platform” for API development that’s used by developers to test API calls and validate that their responses are accurate. Postman also provides collaboration tools so developers can work together to share, test, document and monitor their APIs.

It offers both a free Pro version and paid Enterprise version of the platform, the latter with additional functionality and support for larger teams of developers.

Adoption of Postman’s API testing platform, which began life as a simple Chrome browser extension, has soared since its launch back in 2014. Today, Postman claims more than 6 million developers across 200,000 companies worldwide are using its platform.

Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and chief executive officer at Postman, told SiliconANGLE the main reason for Postman’s growth is that its platform supports “every stage of the API lifecycle,” whereas other tools tend to focus on a specialized area such as design or testing.

“In addition, Postman offers support to make API development as manageable as possible via tools like the Postman API, Newman, our command-line tool, a growing list of third-party integrations, and the API Network,” Asthana said.

Postman’s growth is certainly impressive, but Asthana said his company plans to use the new funds to accelerate its product roadmap in a bid to win even more developers over to its side. For example, one of the next steps is to add support for GraphQL, which is an open-source query language first developed by Facebook Inc. that describes how a client should request information through an API.

Support for GraphQL is an important capability for Postman to have, as many developers believe it’s superior to older API technologies such as SOAP and REST. That’s because it helps create more flexible APIs that can be adjusted with changing needs and provides more uniformity across applications.

“We also plan to continue adding more collaboration features such as user group management, team configuration management, multiteam collaboration and guest accounts,” Asthana said.

Image: Postman/Facebook