I’m delighted to announce that Kong, the world’s most popular open source API gateway — and API and service lifecycle management platform — has raised $43 million in a Series C financing with participation from GGV and existing investors including Index, Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and new investor World Innovation Lab. We’ve been tracking the progress of Kong, both as a highly successful open source project and as a rapidly growing commercial company, for some time, and at GGV, we’re very excited to finally become an investor in the company. Our enthusiasm results from Kong’s dynamic founders and the team they’re assembling, the rapid growth and commitment of its open source community, and the commercial momentum Kong has built with large enterprises adopting a modern API-driven architecture.
- Leadership. Kong’s founders, Augusto (“Aghi”) Marietti and Marco Palladino, bring incredible drive and focus to Kong. Coming to Silicon Valley as total outsiders, they toiled for years to find capital and product/market fit. They persevered and stayed very close to the market. This allowed them to develop Kong open source, finding strong demand as a modern API gateway and platform. Fast forward to today, Aghi and Marco have built a team of over 100 people, including execs with experience at companies such as Mulesoft, MongoDB and Cisco. This team is executing at a very high level and sets the company up for continued strong growth.
- Rabid open source community. Kong open source solves a critical set of issues for anyone adopting microservices, helping secure, manage and orchestrate APIs in a scalable way. Aghi and Marco devote meaningful time and energy investing in the open source community, and the company continues to build meaningful value into Kong open source. As a result, Kong has been downloaded millions of times, with 20,000+ stars on GitHub. Kong’s annual user conference, Kong Summit, continues to grow in popularity as well. Last year’s event had 200+ attendees and this year is likely to be more than double that size. Expect Kong to stay committed to its open source heritage and continue to invest in its open source products and community.
- Commercial momentum. As software continues to eat the world, more and more companies are adopting modern software architectures, including microservices and containers, APIs, orchestration cloud computing, to help drive differentiation. Kong’s commercial strategy fits right into this trend, and large enterprises in technology, banking, e-commerce and other industries are entrusting Kong’s enterprise products to power literally trillions of API transactions. The company is investing to continue to support and make successful its large enterprise customers; that’s what this round is all about.
We’re so excited to see where Kong goes from here, and we’re delighted to be along for the ride. The best is yet to come!