KONG

Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino are two Italians who started Mashape in 2009 in Milan, then moved to San Francisco. Mashape was a marketplace where developers could find and sell APIs.

To run it, they built an internal tool that managed, secured, and routed all the API traffic. That internal tool, which they open-sourced as Kong, took off harder than the marketplace ever did.

In 2017 they made the hard call to sell the Mashape marketplace to RapidAPI, rename the company Kong, and bet everything on the gateway. It was the right call.

Kong gives away the core Kong Gateway as open-source software, then charges for the enterprise version and cloud service. The free version handles routing and securing API traffic for any developer.

The paid Kong Konnect platform adds the management, analytics, security, and support that big companies need to run APIs across thousands of services. The pitch is simple.

APIs are how modern software talks to itself, and Kong wants to be the toll booth every request passes through.

Kong Gateway is the open-source core that routes and secures API traffic. Kong Konnect is the paid cloud platform for managing APIs across an organization.

Kong Mesh handles service-to-service communication inside complex systems. The newer AI Gateway routes and governs traffic to multiple large language models from one place.

Open source was the growth hack. By giving away Kong Gateway, the company got it installed inside thousands of engineering teams for free, then sold the enterprise upgrade once those teams depended on it.

This bottoms-up adoption meant developers brought Kong in before any salesperson called. As companies broke their software into microservices and APIs multiplied, Kong became more useful, not less.

More recently it pushed into AI, launching an AI Gateway in 2024 to route traffic between large language models.

Kong sells into a brutally competitive market. Cloud giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all offer their own API gateways bundled into their platforms, often cheaply or free.

Kong has to convince companies that a dedicated, cloud-neutral tool beats the convenient default from their cloud provider. Staying ahead means constant reinvention, which is why the AI Gateway push matters.

The risk is getting squeezed between free open-source rivals below and deep-pocketed cloud platforms above.

Kong has raised around $345 million from top-tier investors betting that APIs are the connective tissue of modern software. Tiger Global led a $100 million Series D in 2021 that tripled the valuation to $1.4 billion.

Earlier backers include Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. A 2024 financing of $175 million pushed the valuation to $2 billion.