Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Numaan Ashraf

"Careers and companies make sense in reverse. What carries you forward is curiosity to explore, focus to commit, and conviction to move early."

I have Kerala roots, an early failed founder stint behind me, and eleven years at Postman.

I joined Postman as a founding engineer, when it was still a tool engineers passed to each other quietly, the way you'd recommend a good restaurant. I stayed long enough to help turn it into infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of teams, and eventually the world's largest enterprises, couldn't work without. Along the way, I moved from writing code to leading product, platform and forward-deployed engineering teams, scaling the technology as usage grew by orders of magnitude, and building the engineering organization to ship it. What I care most about is working backwards from the customer: starting with what people actually need and letting that shape both the technology you build and the team you build around it.

At Peak XV, my focus is broad across AI. I work with founders building technology-native companies: AI-native services and products, the software infrastructure for a new agentic era of software engineering, infrastructure for AI agents themselves, and physical AI. What ties these together is a belief that the next generation of category-defining companies will be built natively around these capabilities rather than retrofitted to them.

I gravitate toward founders who are clear-headed, intellectually honest, and unusually specific about why this, why them, why now.

Numaan Ashraf
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