Kong Raises $100 Million to Accelerate Cloud Connectivity
8.2.2021 18:30:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
Kong Inc., the cloud connectivity company, today announced it has closed $100 million in Series D funding, led by Tiger Global Management with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, GGV Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as well as new investor Goldman Sachs. This latest round brings Kong’s total funding to $171 million, tripling its valuation to $1.4 billion since the Series C round. Kong will use the capital to scale its go-to-market operations, grow world-class Engineering and Customer Experience teams, and accelerate cloud connectivity with its new SaaS-based Kong Konnect service connectivity platform.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210208005517/en/
Kong Co-Founders Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino (Photo: Business Wire)
“The shift to digital and cloud has been revolutionary across all fronts, quickly propelling developer-led organizations and API-first companies to the forefront,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management. “With impressive momentum, happy customers and strong market share, Kong is primed to help organizations meet the growing demands of this new digital reality and succeed in today’s cloud native world. We have been following the company closely for the past couple of years, and Kong is really starting to pull away from the rest of the pack.”
The fundraise follows a record year for Kong, marked by a significant increase in adoption of its flagship open source software – Kong Gateway – now exceeding 220 million total downloads and 1.5 million monthly active instances. The company added key Global 2000 companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Papa John’s and Siemens to its growing enterprise customer base, as well as tripled its small business and mid-market enterprise customers. In addition, Kong was recognized as an Inc. 5000 company and a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company with 1,908% revenue growth over a three-year period.
“In 2020, we saw an explosion of data in motion and services as companies fast-tracked the release of new digital experiences in response to the pandemic,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Software is truly becoming like a giant nervous system through millions of APIs and services. Kong is on a mission to become the spinal cord and backbone by building the cloud connectivity fabric of the future.”
IDC predicts that worldwide data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, with 49% of the data residing in the cloud. According to Gartner, cloud native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than three-quarters of new digital workloads by 2024. Kong Konnect, a full-stack service connectivity platform designed for cloud native applications and delivered as a service, enables developers, architects and operators to seamlessly deliver connectivity at the edge, within their applications and between applications. It provides universal service connectivity and management that is reliable, observable and secure across any infrastructure.
“Modern infrastructure is driven by open source technologies, and Kong’s open source DNA has played a pivotal role in driving its adoption both in the community and in enterprise organizations,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong Konnect takes cloud connectivity to the next level by providing a full-stack service connectivity platform that goes from API gateways to services meshes via open technologies like Kong Gateway, CNCF’s Kuma and Insomnia – running across every cloud and every platform, including on Kubernetes and VMs. Teams around the world can now abstract away their enterprise L4-L7 connectivity in one click to build secure, resilient and distributed applications like never before.”
Additional Resources
About Kong Inc.
Kong creates software and managed services that connect APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kong’s service connectivity platform enables digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs and services for modern architectures, including microservices, serverless and service mesh. By providing developer teams with unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210208005517/en/
Contact information
Pauline Louie, Kong, (628) 243-7512, press@konghq.com
Jill Reed, Sift Communications for Kong, kong@siftpr.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Vercel Brings New Agent Framework, Full-Stack Capabilities, and Enterprise Controls to Its Agentic Infrastructure Platform17.6.2026 13:13:00 EEST | Press release
Today at Ship, its annual conference, Vercel introduced a set of new products that deepen its agentic infrastructure platform trusted by DoorDash, Helly Hansen, OpenAI, Stripe, and The Weather Company. Founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch and other Vercel leaders unveiled the lineup on stage, anchored by three shifts the products address: agents are now the dominant way software gets deployed, every application is becoming agentic, and enterprises need to run agents in production securely and at scale. The transition is well underway. Six months ago, fewer than three percent of deployments to Vercel infrastructure were triggered by coding agents. Agents now account for more than half. Token volume through Vercel's AI Gateway has grown from roughly two trillion to twenty trillion per month over the same period. And over the past year, Vercel has invested heavily in Python and backend frameworks, with a growing share of customers now running backends and databases alongside their frontends. "
NIQ Introduces NIQ Cadence: A Compound AI Operating System for Marketing Effectiveness17.6.2026 13:00:00 EEST | Press release
NIQ (NYSE: NIQ), a global leader in consumer intelligence, today introduced NIQ Cadence, a compound AI operating system built to change how organizations measure marketing performance, optimize budgets, and act on what the data tells them. NIQ Cadence brings data and intelligence into one continuous environment, moving marketers off fragmented reports and onto a single system that empowers decision making. Marketing has never been more complex. Channels keep multiplying, data sits in silos, and the pressure to prove ROI keeps climbing. As a result, most teams still stitch insight and action together by hand, losing time and confidence at every handoff. NIQ Cadence closes that gap with one system where measurement and decision-making finally run together. “Marketing leaders don’t need more reports. They need a better rhythm,” said Jason Tate, General Manager of Marketing Effectiveness at NIQ. “NIQ Cadence moves organizations beyond disconnected data, siloed tools, and disparate insights
WISE Closes Oversubscribed Series D Financing Round of €30 Million, Welcoming ENEA Tech and Biomedical as Strategic New Investor17.6.2026 13:00:00 EEST | Press release
WISE S.p.A., a pioneering medical device company specializing in advanced implantable electrodes for neuromonitoring, neuromodulation, and brain-computer interface (BCI), today announced the successful closing of an oversubscribed Series D financing round totaling €30 million. The round was joined by ENEA Tech and Biomedical, an Italian foundation dedicated to innovation and technology transfer in the biomedical sector, which enters WISE's investor base as a strategic partner. This final closing builds on the first closing of the round completed in June 2024, which included a venture debt facility from the European Investment Bank (EIB) supported by InvestEU, alongside an equity investment from new investor Wallaby S.p.A. — the family office of the Scagliarini family (GVS S.p.A.) — and existing financial partners New Frontier S.r.l., Eureka Venture SGR, and Indaco Ventures SGR. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20
Winning With AI Requires Organizational Transformation, Not Speed of Adoption, Finds New Arthur D. Little Report17.6.2026 13:00:00 EEST | Press release
To successfully embrace the power of AI, businesses need to remove organizational complexity and eliminate unnecessary work, rather than simply using it for fragmented, incremental improvements. Boards must act now to deliver this. That is the key message from AI-First or Disrupted: Beating the Nightmare Competitor, a new report from Arthur D. Little (ADL) based on concrete examples from leading organizations. Within three to five years, AI-first competitors will make faster decisions, have flatter organizations, and operate at lower costs. They will not just optimize handovers between teams, approvals, and reconciliation work; they will eliminate these complex processes entirely. AI is completely changing the economics of work and value creation, removing the need for coordination across multiple teams, while also enabling adaptive, predictive, and personalized products and services. This delivers both lower operational costs and a fundamentally stronger value proposition. However, mo
VENU+ Brings Next-Generation Guest Experience Technology to Al Shallal Theme Park17.6.2026 13:00:00 EEST | Press release
VENU+, a leading global provider of tech-enabled guest mobility, storage, and entertainment solutions today announced the upcoming deployment of its GoPod® Locker technology platform at Al Shallal Theme Park, one of Saudi Arabia’s most recognized amusement destinations. VENU+ is backed by ZCG Private Equity, the private equity arm of Z Capital Group (“ZCG”), a privately held global firm. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617240101/en/ The installation, scheduled to go live in Summer 2026, marks VENU+’s first customer deployment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and represents another milestone in the company’s accelerating global expansion across high-growth tourism and entertainment markets. Located in the heart of Jeddah near the city’s Formula One circuit, Al Shallal Theme Park has long served as a premier entertainment destination for local families and visitors. Through the deployment, VENU+ will implement
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom