Kong Inc. is the company behind Kong Gateway, one of the most widely used API gateways in the world. Originally built as a layer on top of NGINX, Kong Gateway handles authentication, rate limiting, logging, and traffic management for API calls between microservices.
The open-source Kong Gateway has been downloaded billions of times and is used by organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. It’s available as a standalone gateway or as a Kubernetes ingress controller, making it flexible enough for both traditional and cloud-native architectures.
Kong’s commercial products include Kong Konnect (a SaaS control plane), Kong Mesh (built on Envoy proxy), and Kong Insomnia (an API development tool acquired from the popular open-source project). Together, these form a complete API lifecycle management platform.
Founded in 2009 (originally as Mashape, an API marketplace), the company pivoted to focus on Kong Gateway after it gained massive open-source adoption. Kong has raised over $200 million in funding from investors including Tiger Global, Index Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a globally distributed team.
