Kong Raises $43 Million to Connect the Next Era of Software
Today, we have some exciting news! We’re announcing our $43 million Series C round, led by Index Ventures and our board member Mike Volpi, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (Martin Casado) and CRV (Devdutt Yellurkar), as well as new strategic investors GGV Capital and World Innovation Lab (WiL).
We believe that the way software is created is undergoing a revolution as large organizations transition to brand-new, distributed software architectures that span multi-cloud and hybrid architectures. Services and APIs act as the glue that connects these distributed architectures by enabling information to flow in and out across all environments. By 2030, there will be over 500B connected devices and all those will have services and APIs.
This funding is the culmination of many years of work that resulted in a record breaking 2018. Last year we accomplished things that we never could have imagined back in 2009 when we were working out of a garage in Milan. We hit more than 54 million open-source Kong downloads and reached over 100 Kong Enterprise customers including Yahoo! Japan, WeWork, SoulCycle, and Ferrari. In 2008, if you had told Marco and me that one of the most iconic Italian companies in history would be our customer, we probably would have called you crazy. Today, they’re one of the many incredible companies worldwide using Kong to usher in the next era of software.
At Kong, our mission is to build the nervous system for the cloud by intelligently brokering information across all types of services. The Kong Service Control Platform is designed to seamlessly connect, govern and run APIs and microservices at scale, across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-prem workloads.
This new cash infusion will allow us to not only enrich the industry's first service control platform for the most demanding enterprise environments but also to double down on our open-source products to support our growing community of developers and to invest in international expansion, including Asia Pacific and Europe.
We're very proud of what our incredible team and open-source community have achieved to date, and we look forward to building a long-lasting, iconic company. We are still in the early days of the long journey of the cloud era, and Kong is just leaving the first of many footsteps.
Onwards!