Kong Unveils Winners of the 2025 Innovator Awards

Announced at API Summit 2025, winners represent the most forward-thinking, innovative Kong use cases 

SAN FRANCISCO, October 16, 2025 – Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API and AI technologies, announced the winners of the Kong Innovator Awards at API Summit 2025 in New York City. The awards recognize the innovative and future-forward projects developed by Kong customers leveraging solutions such as Kong Konnect, AI Gateway, API Gateway and more. 

“The Kong Innovator Awards celebrate customers who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with APIs and AI,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder of Kong Inc. “This year’s winners exemplify what it means to innovate by using Kong to build smarter, faster and more connected systems that are both defining and creating the future of our industry.”

The 2025 Innovator Award honorees include:

• Top Kong Innovator - Americas: SeatGeek was seeing large language models (LLMs) become increasingly important to their workflows, but requests were indistinguishable from ordinary HTTP traffic, making it difficult to ensure trust and safety in AI-driven integrations. They needed a centralized, high-performance solution to validate traffic at scale without slowing down the platform or complicating service code. With Kong Konnect, they centralized LLM request validation at the gateway layer to eliminate the risk of spoofed traffic, avoided the need to duplicate code across more than a dozen microservices, reduced engineering time by two to three weeks of development per service, maintained a seamless user experience, and accelerated time-to-market for new capabilities. 
• Top Kong Innovator - Europe: Siemens needed a centralized, governed, and scalable way to expose event-based data as APIs, blocking innovation and leading to significant architectural debt. They needed a way to democratize access to Kafka messages without pushing the complexity of streaming infrastructure onto every consumer. Through their use of Kong’s plugin system, they turned Kong into a smart control and observability layer. They eliminated the need for decentralized data storage across teams, reduced redundant infrastructure, accelerated integration time by about 70% for new API consumers, and unlocked faster product innovation. 
• Top Kong Innovator - Asia-Pacific: Seaco was feeling the pain points of the shipping industry’s historic reliance on Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for communication between lessors and lessees. EDI messages were failing, and Seaco didn’t know until the customer complained, as there was no way to roll out EDI uniformly across their customer base, and the repair request communication flow was manual, cumbersome, and slow. With Kong, they process API requests in real-time, reduced the legacy EDI process from days to moments, replaced legacy processes with APIs, improved operational effectiveness, and infused AI into their API process.
• Top Kong Innovator - Public Sector: HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was experiencing API proliferation and maintenance overhead issues, inefficient development lifecycles, and overexposure and data governance risks. With Kong, they will streamline API delivery by enabling a self-service experience layer, foster rapid prototyping and deployment, and innovate securely and efficiently across more than 1,800 APIs. HMRC projects that they will reduce the delivery time of new APIs by 40 to 50%, reduce developer workload, save an estimated £500K to £1M annually in development and maintenance costs, boost productivity, and improve data governance.
• Top Kong Innovator - Finance: Verifone’s product and engineering teams faced many challenges from lacking a centralized platform to manage APIs, needing to operate multiple payment gateways across regions, code maintenance overhead, complex network rules, and more. With Kong, they optimized security, authentication, and authorization for Omnichannel Payments, SoftPOS, BYOD, POSCloud, and APM. They have seen Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and time savings, a revenue boost, increased productivity, and improved compliance and resilience posture. Verifone also developed a custom MTLS plugin using the Kong PDK, co-developed an AppDynamics plugin with Kong Professional Services, and many more efforts, not only leveraging Kong’s capabilities but shaping its feature roadmap by creating a two-way growth journey with Kong.
• Top Kong Innovator - AI: H&M’s decentralized approach to LLM adoption created a high-risk environment with critical challenges including security and compliance risks, operational inefficiency and slow innovation, and no financial governance or observability. It was a high-risk approach that was a major barrier to securely scaling AI initiatives enterprise-wide. With Kong AI Gateway, they pivoted from a fragmented model to a secure and scalable platform. They anticipate accelerated innovation with the onboarding time for new AI services expected to shrink from weeks to days, immediate financial oversight, reduced LLM operational costs through intelligent routing and centralized rate limiting, and 100% centralized logging and auditability for all AI traffic to meet compliance requirements.
• Top Kong Innovator - Enterprise Transformation: United Airlines’ legacy systems were resulting in tool sprawl, latency issues, increased costs, and duplicated efforts due to limited service discoverability. In shaping a 10-year strategy to modernize their customer-facing solutions and improve customer experience, they needed to replace its legacy systems with modern, best-of-breed systems. Through Kong Konnect, United has enabled reliable, secure, and scalable data and information exchange across APIs and microservices, implemented standardization organization-wide for designing, building, publishing, and securing APIs and microservices, removed data silos, and moved to a cloud native platform to manage its 1000s of APIs across 100s of app teams. United has been able to reduce API onboarding time by 2 to 3x, reduce latency for mission-critical workloads, and significantly improve reliability and security posture.
• Innovator of the Year: BMW was using a monolithic central on-premises API Gateway to handle all of their ConnectedDrive traffic. Oliver Heinze, Product Owner - Connected Company, spearheaded the adoption of Kong to address their challenges of data center availability, port availability, lack of scalability, and network latencies. Since Oliver and the broader BMW team began working with Kong, latencies dropped from greater than 250ms to less than 30ms between client and service. BMW customers have benefited from enhanced reliability and BMW’s architecture was simplified with every microservice having its own API Gateway, reducing dependencies and allowing more direct communications.

To receive updates about API Summit 2026 and future Kong Innovator Awards, please visit https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-summit.