Watching Kong grow from a tiny place over the years has been a once-in-a-lifetime shared journey with our Kongers and investors. Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Kong has recently reached another instrumental milestone: surpassing $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). This accomplishment speaks volumes, but I’m even more excited about the potential that lies ahead when sizing the large API market opportunity

An interesting fact I learned is that only 4% of companies that reach $10 million ARR ever make it to $100 million ARR.

From tuna pasta 24/7 to $100 million ARR

When we started our first company (Mashape, which Kong spun out from in 2017) back in 2009, we had a tiny garage in Milan, Italy, two IKEA desks, and an idea. In those days, Marco Palladino (Kong’s CTO and Co-Founder) and I watched people in Silicon Valley grow their ideas into companies from far away. 

But with a little luck, we got accepted into a popular San Francisco pitch competition at that time. We flew to the States and survived by sleeping on strangers' couches and eating a steady diet of canned tuna and pasta for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — along with some rice and beans the occasional free slice of pizza from Bay Area meetups.

After countless sleepless nights and networking events (including some we may or may not actually have been invited to) we were able to get the very first funds to start growing our first business that would later become Kong.

Back then, we had a vision that cloud APIs would power every application and surround us with new digital experiences. APIs were becoming the Assembly Line of software. In the years since, we’ve witnessed numerous business tailwinds emerge, including:

• Shifts into cloud computing
• Microservices and containerization
• The rise of Blockchain and Web 3 
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Mobile apps
• And the largest tailwind to date, the wide-scale proliferation of AI 

Taken together, it’s self-evident that a major increase in API sprawl lies ahead. 

Today, our vision is taking shape thanks to our leading API products used by hundreds of customers from Kong Konnect, the unified API platform; Kong Mesh; Kong Enterprise; and Kong Insomnia — all built on the trust of the thousands of developers that adopted our open source technologies like Kong Gateway. 

The next chapter of Kong’s story

Much has changed since those early days, but we still have tons to do and a roadmap a mile long to keep innovating with the best API technologies. Widespread adoption of Kong’s products and global customer expansion have helped fuel hypergrowth in 2023. But this accomplishment comes from our customers ( thank you!) and our own Kongers’ relentless focus on championing each of those customers. I couldn’t be prouder of our team today!

Marco and I, along with the more than 500 Kongers around the world, are thrilled to keep building an endurance generational company as we continue pushing forward the next-gen API technologies. 

Onwards,

Aghi 

PS: Celebrating in Kong style

To celebrate this milestone, we adopted a gorilla for each Konger through the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to help preserve their habitats and to help maintain gorilla populations!