“Kong’s open-source DNA has played a pivotal role in driving its adoption both in the community and in enterprise organizations,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong (photo: left) with co-founder and CEO Augusto Marietti (photo: right).Cloud connectivity company Kong has closed $100 million in Series D funding, led by Tiger Global Management. This latest round brings Kong’s total funding to $171 million, tripling its valuation to $1.4 billion since the Series C round.
Kong will use the capital to scale its go-to-market operations, grow its engineering and customer experience teams, and accelerate cloud connectivity with its new SaaS-based Kong Konnect service connectivity platform.
The fundraise follows a record year for Kong, marked by a significant increase in adoption of its flagship open-source software – Kong Gateway – now exceeding 220 million total downloads and 1.5 million monthly active instances. The company added key Global 2000 companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Papa John’s and Siemens to its growing enterprise customer base. It also tripled its small business and mid-market enterprise customers. In addition, Kong was recognized as an Inc. 5000 company and a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company with 1,908% revenue growth over a three-year period.
“In 2020, we saw an explosion of data in motion and services as companies fast-tracked the release of new digital experiences in response to the pandemic,” said Augusto Marietti, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder of Kong. “Software is truly becoming like a giant nervous system through millions of APIs and services. Kong is on a mission to become the spinal cord and backbone by building the cloud connectivity fabric of the future.”
Connectivity At The Edge
Kong Konnect, a full-stack service connectivity platform designed for cloud native applications and delivered as-a-service, would enable developers, architects and operators to seamlessly deliver connectivity at the edge, within their applications and between applications. It would provide universal service connectivity and management to be “reliable, observable and secure” across any infrastructure.
“Modern infrastructure is driven by open-source technologies, and Kong’s open-source DNA has played a pivotal role in driving its adoption both in the community and in enterprise organizations,” said Marco Palladino, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Kong. “Kong Konnect takes cloud connectivity to the next level by providing a full-stack service connectivity platform that goes from API gateways to services meshes via open technologies like Kong Gateway, CNCF’s Kuma and Insomnia – running across every cloud and every platform, including on Kubernetes and VMs. Teams around the world can now abstract away their enterprise L4-L7 connectivity in one click to build secure, resilient and distributed applications like never before.”
The Series D funding round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, GGV Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as well as new investor Goldman Sachs.
“The shift to digital and cloud has been revolutionary across all fronts, quickly propelling developer-led organizations and API-first companies to the forefront,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management. “With impressive momentum, happy customers and strong market share, Kong is primed to help organizations meet the growing demands of this new digital reality and succeed in today’s cloud native world. We have been following the company closely for the past couple of years, and Kong is really starting to pull away from the rest of the pack.”
