Kong Inc.
Kong builds the connectivity layer for APIs, AI, events, and services. Its stated mission has been to enable every company to become API-first, now extending to secure, govern, and manage AI traffic and agent connectivity.
At a Glance
- Startups and developer-led companies
- Mid-market and Global 2000 enterprises
- Financial services and banking
- Telecommunications
- +5 more
AI Tools by Kong Inc.
(4)
Kong Gateway
Open Source API LLM Gateway
Volcano
AI Backend Infrastructure for Agents
Insomnia
Open Source API Client Tool
Kong Konnect
Enterprise API Management Platform
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Products & Services
Lightweight, fast, cloud-native API gateway/reverse proxy for routing, securing, managing, and observing APIs across hybrid, multi-cloud, on-premises, Kubernetes, VMs, and serverless environments.
Managed SaaS connectivity and API platform providing managed control planes, Gateway, analytics, governance, developer portal, API product management, monetization, and automation.
Gateway for routing and governing LLM, agent, MCP, and AI traffic, with guardrails, observability, model routing, token/cost controls, semantic caching, and security.
Gateway for event and Kafka traffic, including traffic control, field-level encryption, topic aliasing, and analytics.
Market Position
Kong positions itself as an open-source, cloud-native API and AI connectivity platform spanning API gateway, service mesh, event gateway, SaaS control plane, developer tooling and AI governance. It competes with API-management and gateway vendors such as Apigee/Google Cloud, Amazon API Gateway, Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, MuleSoft, Tyk, WSO2, NGINX and Gravitee; Insomnia also competes with Postman. Kong differentiates through its open-source adoption, hybrid/multi-cloud runtime, broad plugin/automation ecosystem and unified API-to-AI traffic management.
Leadership
Founders
Augusto (Aghi) Marietti
Italian entrepreneur; co-founded Mashape and served as its CEO before co-founding Kong, where he is CEO.
Marco Palladino
Italian technologist; schoolmate of Augusto Marietti, co-founded Mashape and helped build its API marketplace, then co-founded Kong and became its CTO.
Executive Team
Augusto Marietti
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
Previously co-founded and led Mashape; co-founded Kong in 2009.
Marco Palladino
Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder
Previously co-founded Mashape and built its API marketplace; co-founded Kong.
Board of Directors
Founding Story
Kong began in Milan in 2009 when schoolmates Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino rented a garage to build a tool for building applications without code. After moving to San Francisco and building Mashape into an API marketplace, they found the marketplace had become a monolith; they created an API gateway to decompose it into microservices, recognized the same problem in customers' architectures, open-sourced the gateway, and focused the company on Kong.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Open-core enterprise software and SaaS: free/open-source Gateway and Insomnia drive adoption, while Kong monetizes Konnect subscriptions, enterprise/self-managed licenses, usage-based API/AI requests and resources, paid plugins, support, and professional services.
Pricing Tiers
Includes a 30-day free trial; usage-based charges apply.
Enterprise controls such as SSO, RBAC, SCIM and audit logging, with customizable limits, support and volume discounts.
Self-hosted enterprise gateway licensing and support; contact sales.
Target Markets
- Startups and developer-led companies
- Mid-market and Global 2000 enterprises
- Financial services and banking
- Telecommunications
- Retail and e-commerce
- Travel and transportation
- API management for microservices and distributed architectures
- Hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud connectivity
- Kubernetes ingress and API modernization
- Service mesh and east-west service connectivity
- Event-driven architectures and Kafka governance
- AI/LLM gatewaying, agent and MCP governance
- Siemens
- Deutsche Telekom
- Orange
- Papa Johns