Zuplo

Zuplo is a fully managed API gateway built by former engineers and product leaders from Facebook, Stripe, Microsoft, and Auth0. It positions itself as the fastest path from signup to a production-ready API, covering authentication, rate limiting, developer portals, monetization, and — more recently — AI gateway and MCP server capabilities in a single platform.

What It Is

Zuplo is a cloud-native API management platform that runs on 300+ edge locations worldwide, delivering sub-50ms latency with a stated 99.99% uptime SLA. Unlike traditional gateways that require self-managed infrastructure or proprietary DSLs, Zuplo uses TypeScript-based policies, GitOps-native deployment (every Git branch becomes a live environment), and an OpenAPI-first configuration model. The platform targets engineering teams that want to ship API products without assembling and maintaining separate infrastructure for auth, rate limiting, documentation, and billing.

Core Platform Capabilities

Zuplo bundles a wide set of API management primitives into one platform:

• Authentication: API keys (hashed at rest, edge-replicated, with GitHub leak detection), JWT, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mutual TLS, and custom TypeScript auth handlers
• Rate limiting: Per-IP, per-API-key, per-tenant, and per-token limits enforced at the edge before traffic reaches the origin; monthly quotas also supported
• Developer portal: Auto-generated from OpenAPI specs, with interactive API explorer, self-serve key issuance, monetization-aware pricing pages, and custom React pages on a custom domain
• API monetization: Subscriptions, plan-scoped API keys, real-time metering, soft and hard quotas, and a self-serve pricing page — all configured as gateway policies
• Observability: Real-time logs and analytics per request, with consumer-level attribution and integrations into external stacks (DataDog, Loki, AWS CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry)
• GitOps: Gateway configuration lives in a Git repo; every push deploys atomically, every PR gets a preview URL on the global edge

AI Gateway and MCP Server Features

Zuplo has expanded beyond traditional API management to address AI workloads. The AI Gateway (described as generally available) sits in front of LLM providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others — and adds token budget enforcement, semantic caching, per-team quotas, prompt injection blocking, and model failover/load balancing. The MCP Gateway (noted as in beta at the time of writing) lets teams centralize discovery, authentication, and access controls for Model Context Protocol servers used by AI agents, with RBAC, virtual MCP servers, and audit logging. Separately, the MCP Server feature auto-generates a compliant MCP server from any existing OpenAPI spec, inheriting the same auth, rate limits, and observability as the underlying API — with no custom code required.

Deployment Model and Enterprise Fit

Zuplo offers three deployment surfaces:

• Managed Edge: Serverless across 300+ data centers; push to Git and go live in under a minute
• Managed Dedicated: Single-tenant Zuplo on the customer's cloud of choice (Akamai, AWS, Azure, GCP, or Equinix), operated by Zuplo
• Self-Hosted: Helm chart on any Kubernetes cluster (EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, on-prem), including hybrid and air-gapped environments

Enterprise add-ons include SSO/SAML (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), RBAC, immutable audit logs, WAF, DDoS protection, private connectivity (WireGuard tunnels, PrivateLink, mTLS, VPC peering), and contractual SLAs up to 99.999%. The platform holds SOC 2 Type II certification and supports custom DPAs and BAAs.

Update: MCP Gateway Beta and AI Expansion

The Zuplo homepage and blog reference the MCP Gateway as "now in beta," representing the platform's most recent major capability addition. The learning center contains articles dated through June 2026 covering MCP server architecture, MCP gateway governance, AI gateway comparisons, and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol guidance — signaling active product development in the AI infrastructure direction. The platform's changelog and learning center show continuous publishing activity, with the product roadmap publicly accessible at zuplo.com/roadmap.

Competitive Positioning

Zuplo's pricing page explicitly compares the platform against Kong, Apigee, and AWS API Gateway, claiming teams typically cut gateway spend by 40–70% after switching. The founders' note on the pricing page states the platform does not charge per developer seat and does not paywall the developer portal. Customer case studies published by Zuplo include Blockdaemon (vendor-reported 70% cost reduction and 90% hardware footprint reduction), AccuWeather (vendor-reported 1B+ end users served), and Finsolutia (vendor-reported MCP server launch in hours on regulated APIs).