Type of business | Private |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Founded | October 2017 |
Headquarters | San Francisco |
Founder(s) | Augusto Marietti (CEO) Marco Palladino (CTO) |
Industry | Cloud services |
URL | konghq.com |
Registration | Required |
Current status | Active |
Kong Inc. is a software company that provides open-source platforms and cloud services for managing, monitoring, and scaling application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices. Some of the products offered by Kong Inc. include: Kong Gateway, an open-source API gateway; Kong Enterprise, an API platform that is built on top of Kong Gateway; Kong Konnect, a service connectivity platform; Kuma, an open-source service mesh; Kong Mesh, an enterprise-grade service mesh that is built on top of Kuma; and Insomnia, an open-source API design and testing tool.
The original product was first developed in 2009 in Milan, Italy and first incorporated in the US as Mashape, Inc. The original project was a mash-up (web application hybrid) platform used to aggregate different functions and UI elements from third-party products and services. While developing the product the team dealt with a number of APIs, which inspired the founders to create a unified hub to organize the growing market of APIs. In November 2010 Mashape appeared online as an Alpha product [1] and launched in private Beta in June 2011. [2] The team raised the first funds in the US. [3] In 2010, Mashape received its first angel funding and a further $1,500,000 in seed funding. [4] [5] Mashape then rejected some acquisition offers in 2011. [6]
In 2015 Mashape launched an open source project called Kong, which later helped the company secure an $18 million in Series B funding. Subsequently, with the intention of pivoting the company's focus to its new Kong business, Mashape sold API Marketplace to RapidAPI, [7] [8] and rebranded the company to Kong Inc. [9] [10]
In 2019, Kong acquired Insomnia, an open-source API testing platform. [11]
In 2015, Mashape released Kong, an open-source management layer for APIs and Microservices that is built on top of Nginx and Cassandra/ PostgreSQL with the claim of improving performance and reliability. Kong is the main engine of Mashape's marketplace. [12]