And we have yet another cloud computing upstart, riding high on the massive digital burst that COVID 19 brought along. Kong Inc., the California-based cloud connectivity company, announced on Monday that it has raised $100 million in a Series D round, led by Tiger Global. This brings Kong’s total fundraise till date to $171 million. The current round has catapulted Kong’s valuation to $1.4Bn, thrice of what it achieved in Series C. This funding also includes existing investors Index Ventures, CRV, GGV Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz as well as new investor Goldman Sachs.
Kong will utilize the new capital to scale and expand its go-to-market operations, grow engineering and customer experience teams, as well as acceleration of cloud connectivity with its new SaaS-based Kong Konnect service connectivity platform.
John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management, said, “The shift to digital and cloud has been revolutionary across all fronts, quickly propelling developer-led organizations and API-first companies to the forefront. 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.”
This fundraiser is a fitting epilogue to a fantastic year for Kong, which saw them attract “an amazing and talented group of employees along with fantastic customers.” 2020 has been good to the company – it witnessed an increase of 50% in the adoption of Kong Gateway, its flagship open-source software and an integral part of the Konnect-managed connectivity platform, to exceed 220 million downloads and 1.5 million monthly active instances. Additionally, 2020 saw Kong get recognized as an Inc. 5000 company and a DeloitteTechnology Fast 5000 company after it registered a growth of 1908% in revenue over three years.
Augusto Marietti, co-founder and CEO of Kong, said that they had recorded an “explosion of data in motion and services as companies fast-tracked the release of new digital experiences in response to the pandemic. 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.” Marco Palladino is the other founder and currently the chief technology officer of Kong Inc.
“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,” Palladino said. “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.”
Kong handles Kong Konnect, one of the many cloud platforms in the world which are slated to serve as the foundations for more than three-quarters of new digital workloads by 2024. Statistics reveal that nearly half of worldwide data will reside in the cloud by 2025.
