Kong Raises $175M to Power the API World

No AI without APIs — as we say here at Kong. I’m excited to officially share our oversubscribed Kong Series E financing at a $2 billion valuation! We raised $175 million in both primary and secondary, led again by Tiger Global and co-led by new investor Balderton as well as new strong participation from long-only Teachers’ Venture Growth (the late-stage growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan). Additionally, many of our existing investors such as Index Ventures, a16z, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, and Notable Capital also participated. We also added 137 Ventures, Founders Circle, and StepStone as new participants. This represents an almost 45% increase in our valuation from our previous round.

We’re encouraged to see our existing investors “doubling down” and thank them for their continued support. This, combined with the outside market validation of new investors, shows confidence in Kong’s vision and execution in taking over the API jungle!

It’s also a reflection of Kong's leadership and the growing API opportunity ahead of us. It's a testament to our team's hard work and focus and the trust our customers put in us, and we thank them again for giving us the opportunity to help them manage and secure trillions of API calls a day. Thank you.

Our opportunity ahead is massive: the API wave continues to grow at an unprecedented rate in both the number of APIs and API calls, fueled by the transition to cloud, digital devices entering every corner of our lives, and — if that wasn’t enough — GenAI as of latest. Keep in mind that behind each token, there are one or many API calls. Kong is now uniquely positioned to become the universal broker of that strategic API traffic. And by doing that, we’re able to build a de-facto world's API inventory to help our customers consolidate disparate systems. That will allow our users to have a unified experience of their entire API estate, from management, to security, to observability. Ultimately this will enable every company to become an API company and build the software “assembly line” of the AI era. 

Where do LLM and AI agents go to get their tasks done without APIs?

We’re accelerating on our mission with this new funding, and investing in a few key areas: increasing product innovation to enhance our unified API platform, expanding the footprint of our API runtimes (such as AI Gateway), advancing Insomnia and AI-infused applications, while continuing to support our widely loved open-source projects. We’re also leaning in on global expansion with new GTM investments to span our growing customer base from new markets, such as Japan and India. And we’ll keep adding new world-class talent in every function across Kong. 

As we transition from UI-based consumption of the internet to machine-based services via APIs, this new AI wave will drive a surge of new data centers and increased electricity consumption. Ultimately, this will require a new networking infrastructure to make it all connected. In the cloud, it will all come to life with more APIs. 

No AI without APIs. The best has yet to come.

Onwards!