API platform Postman has acquired API documentation- and SDK-generation startup Fern to extend its support for developers around API adoption.

The acquisition targets common pain points, including poor documentation and brittle libraries, that slow adoption of APIs and drive up their integration and support costs.

“Postman already helps enterprises design, test, and validate APIs internally. What Fern solves is the next step and, often, the messier step of making those APIs easy for external or customer developers to understand, integrate, and trust,” said Akshat Tyagi, associate practice leader at HFS Research.

Fern has two main offerings: Fern Docs, which generates documentation from an API definition, and SDK Generator, which creates client SDKs for APIs in nine languages.

Fern Docs can help keep documentation current as an API evolves, rather than letting it fall out of sync and creating confusion among developers, broken integrations, and an increase in support tickets, Tyagi said.

Its integration with Postman will help the company address a popular developer demand, according to Tyagi. “Many developers don’t want to work directly with raw APIs. They want clean, language-specific SDKs that feel native in their environment,” he said.

Gaurav Dewan, research director at IT management consulting firm Avasant, said the acquisition could also help Postman customers sell their technology via APIs more easily.

“According to Stack Overflow, about 75% of developers are more likely to endorse a technology if it provides good API access. This suggests APIs are a key factor in tech adoption decisions,” he said.

Rising interest in frameworks like FastAPI and languages such as Python and JavaScript commonly used to build APIs also indicate healthy API ecosystem growth.

The acquisition will also help Postman close a long-standing operational gap between vendors, who specialize in developer experience, and API management vendors, he said.

While API management platforms such as Apigee, MuleSoft, and Kong remain strong in runtime governance (policies, monetization, multi-gateway, hybrid), vendors such as ReadMe, Redocly, and Stoplight who specialize in developer experience remain strong in documentation and design-first workflows.

“By bringing idiomatic SDKs and tailored docs into the same ecosystem where APIs are designed and tested, Postman offers a developer-led lifecycle from design, test, docs, SDKs, and adoption, rather than gateway-first governance. This is a differentiated path that complements gateways,” Dewan said, noting that many enterprises still stitch together docs and SDK generation with separate vendors.