With major advances in building the AI connectivity layer and soaring enterprise adoption of agentic systems, this year sparked a hockey-stick surge in demand for the infrastructure that powers intelligent agents. 

Below is a rundown on the updates, the innovations, and the moments that moved the industry in one year-end recap.

2025 was the year enterprises officially crossed the chasm into the Age of AI Connectivity. As the world shifted from human-paced API calls to intelligent agentic systems, organizations began running into a new bottleneck: fragmented AI infrastructure.

Kong has addressed this by introducing the AI Gateway pattern, giving enterprises a unified layer to govern token budgets, enforce security at machine speed, and accelerate workloads with semantic caching. By bringing APIs, LLMs, agents, and event streams together, Kong helps companies tame the “AI fragmentation tax” and operationalize intelligent systems at scale.

Hypervolumes? Handled. AI sprawl? Managed. The agentic era? Officially underway.

In late 2024, Kong secured $175M in Series E funding and hit a $2B valuation, fueling a global acceleration that truly came to life in 2025.

From the start, Kong has always been a truly global company. And in 2025, Kong planted new flags around the world, onboarding new leadership and offices in Bengaluru, Sydney, and Budapest, upsizing our London office to support explosive regional growth, and cutting the ribbon on a bigger, bolder HQ in San Francisco.

From Silicon Valley to Singapore to Shoreditch, Kong teams were everywhere this year.

The infrastructure for the agentic internet is here, and Kong is building it. This was a blockbuster year for product innovation. Some highlights include:

• Kong AI Gateway (now at version 3.13) received major updates, including advanced governance, semantic caching, and hallucination mitigation.
• Kong MCP Gateway was debuted to solve problems around MCP server consistency, MCP authentication, AI workflow costs, and more. We also announced MCP support across Konnect.
• Kong Event Gateway went GA to help productize event data and event APIs.
• We introduced Kong Identity to merge API management and identity, unlocking your API platform's potential.
• Konnect Debugger went GA, granting unprecedented API traffic visibility
• Kong Cloud Gateways expanded to new clouds, unlocked deeper networking capabilities, strengthened reliability guarantees, and achieved PCI DSS 4.0 attestation.
• We rolled out Kong Insomnia 12 with AI-powered testing tools.
• We made it easier to address both sides of API discovery with GA releases of the new Kong Konnect Developer Portal and Konnect Service Catalog.
• We rolled out KAi, the agentic AI platform co-pilot for Kong Konnect.

And there was so much more! Check out the Product Releases section of the blog for everything that rolled out in 2025.

Kong acquired OpenMeter and unveiled Konnect Metering and Billing for monetizing APIs, agents, and event streams — all in one place.

Think real-time usage, flexible pricing, automated billing, and granular cost governance for LLM and agent traffic. As enterprises began scaling autonomous workloads, this became the go-to solution for managing (and monetizing) the economics of AI connectivity.

Enterprise adoption of agents is exploding, and we did the math to see just how much. Kong research found 90% of enterprises are adopting AI agents, and 79% expect full production rollout within three years.

But there are growing pains. Many organizations are having an AI governance wake-up call. 72% of organizations are already implementing formal governance layers, with the AI gateway emerging as the specialized control plane for scaling autonomous operations responsibly.

Want the full story? Check out Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Paving the Path to Production.

API Summit 2025 took over New York City to bring together the leaders shaping the future of agentic AI and unveil the infrastructure that will power it. What followed were two days of ideas, innovation, and hands-on building that set the tone for the next decade of intelligent connectivity.

This year’s summit showcased how fast the agentic era is accelerating, and how organizations across industries are preparing for a world where AI agents orchestrate APIs, events, models, and tools in real time. From breakthrough product launches to customer transformations, the event underscored the future of AI run on connectivity.

• Honoring this year’s innovators: We celebrated BMW, H&M, United Airlines, SeatGeek, and other trailblazers who are redefining what’s possible with Kong’s API and AI technologies with the 2025 Kong Innovator Awards.
• Real-world customer impact: Organizations shared how they are modernizing cloud infrastructure, securing AI governance, and preparing for converged API and AI traffic — all powered by Kong. Check out our customer stories for some highlights.
• A high-energy hackathon that delivered: At the 2025 Kong Agentic AI Hackathon, developers built everything from auto-rollback agents to conversational state plugins to next-gen workflow tooling — proving that the agentic era isn’t theoretical anymore; it’s here and being built right now.

Missed the event? API Summit 2026 is just around the corner and heading to San Francisco. Sign up for updates and be the first to know when registration opens.

For the sixth year in a row, Kong was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management. And Kong was also once again placed furthest for Completeness of Vision.

As Kong evolves from API management to the full AI connectivity layer, this recognition validates the momentum behind a unified platform that secures and scales everything from APIs to LLM calls to autonomous agent traffic.

Learn more about what the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management Report says about APIs and AI success.

Looking back, looking ahead

2025 was the year AI moved from experimentation to enterprise-scale reality and Kong helped lay the groundwork for what comes next. Thank you for being part of our journey. We can't wait to see what 2026 has in store.