Kong Inc. 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.
"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."