Kong Raises $100M Series D to Accelerate API Connectivity

Today, we're excited to share that Kong has closed a $100M Series D financing led by Tiger Global with participation from new investor Goldman Sachs as well as existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and GGV Capital.

This raise triples our valuation to $1.4 billion and will allow us to scale our go-to-market operations even faster. This includes doubling down on engineering to further support our customers in building their connectivity fabric with our cloud-managed service connectivity platform Kong Konnect.

Kong Konnect is a full-stack service connectivity platform designed from the ground up for cloud native applications. Developers, architects and DevOps can now seamlessly deliver reliable connectivity at the edge, within their applications and in between applications from one control plane.

This Series D round marks a major milestone for Kong. It comes on the heels of a record year, where we've been able to attract an amazing and talented group of employees along with fantastic customers. We saw a significant increase in key Global 2000 customers as well as tripled growth in our SMB to mid-market customer segment. The overall Kong community is growing, and we make up just one part of it as we build this future together. Our open source Kong API gateway is now exceeding 220 million total downloads, and Kuma, our universal service mesh, is used in production by 900 organizations with 1128% growth in active instances during 2020. Lastly, our Insomnia API testing tool is now used by hundreds thousands of API developers.

The API Connectivity Opportunity

When Marco Palladino and I put our first footsteps in a garage in Milan over 10 years ago we did bet that the software world would have become a giant Assembly Line (APIs) powered by a new form of metered-based energy (Cloud). What we didn’t know is when… 2020 is the inflection point when Data in Motion becomes the fastest-growing data segment driven by trillions of new programmable cloud services: digital experiences went mainstream. Behind this acceleration, data in motion is one of the fastest growing segments, powered by thousands of new APIs. Why? Because it is just the best, fastest and most efficient way to move data from a server to a client app or from a service to a machine.

According to Akamai's State of the Internet report: API requests already represent 83% of web traffic. When everything becomes an API call over the wire, then a lot of markets that used to be standalone will converge into one massive opportunity that we call API Connectivity.

Many of the conveniences of our digitally connected, modern lives - like using Amazon's Alexa to play music over your home speakers from your Spotify account, asking your car's navigation system to find a less congested route recommended by Google Maps or ordering your favorite meal on Doordash - would be impossible without the APIs that connect companies with their vendors, partners and customers.

Our digital world is becoming fully programmable with two secular trends: cloud traffic and services are growing exponentially each year, creating decentralized but hyper-connected enterprises.

As companies re-architect for scaling in this new world, they are moving to microservices and multi-cloud workloads to address API connectivity challenges to stay reliable and secure.

Every company is looking more and more like a Nervous System with an almost limitless amount of data flow occurring over the Request and Response cycles of API calls. Kong's mission is to power those digital connections in a secure and reliable way by helping customers build their connectivity fabric, with Kong Konnect acting as the central spine behind those interactions that pass through peripheral gateways, edge and side-car proxies.

Onwards

I'm proud of all that Kong has accomplished and grateful for everyone who has contributed to and supported Kong over the years - our own Kongers, investors, the amazing customers, partners and the developer community who we learn from every day on how to get better.

Over the next 100 years, companies won't slow down in migrating to the cloud, building new digital experiences and facing the challenge of how to reliably connect more data within humans, services and machines.

I believe we are only 1% of the way to powering every digital connection in the world, and the most exciting part to me is that the best chapters still need to be written. Onwards!