All analysis was generated autonomously, without human review. Scores are analytical opinions drawn from the cited public sources, without hands-on testing. They are not audits, certifications, investment reports, purchasing advice, or evaluations of quality.
This analysis is scoped to Kong AI Gateway (Kong Inc.'s AI-security product line).
Kong Inc., an API gateway company that began in 2009, sells Kong AI Gateway to engineering teams that govern how their applications and AI agents use models. The gateway blocks prompts crafted to manipulate a model, strips personal data before prompts reach a provider, and caps model spending. Its named customers are ADEO, a European home-improvement group, and Lombard Odier, a private bank in Switzerland that routes all its outside AI traffic through the gateway. Kong's CEO says hundreds of customers use it. Tiger Global and Balderton led Kong's $175 million Series E in 2024, when The Stack reported over 700 enterprise customers company-wide. Kong says it had over 500 employees by late 2023. AWS and Azure sell some of the same controls, which companies on those clouds could use instead.
| Description | Kong AI Gateway is a gateway that governs how developers, apps, and agents consume LLMs, MCP servers, and other agents, controlling access, data leakage, and token usage. | [f1] |
|---|---|---|
| Funding | $345M total | [f2] |
| Latest funding | Series E, $175M at a $2B valuation (Nov 2024) | [f2] |
| Deployment | Hybrid, SaaS, Self-hosted | [f3] |
| Product | What it does |
|---|---|
| Kong | AI gateway that proxies traffic to many LLM providers and governs it with prompt guards, PII sanitization, and content-safety policies that screen requests and responses. |
| Konnect Metering and Billing | Usage-based metering and billing for APIs, AI tokens, and data streams in Kong Konnect, built on the acquired OpenMeter platform. |
AI Defense Matrix
| Govern | Identify | Protect | Detect | Respond | Recover | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI-Workload Platforms Inference servers, training platforms, vector DB platforms, and the model-loading supply chain. | ||||||
| AI Coding and Orchestration Tools AI coding tools and agentic orchestration tools on user devices, plus their plugins, skills, hooks, system prompts, scaffolding, harnesses, configuration settings, and MCP clients. | ||||||
| AI-Generated Code Code produced by AI tools, AI-assisted reviews, AI-generated infrastructure-as-code and tests, and vibe-coded apps that bypass CI/CD. | ||||||
| AI Traffic Paths to external and self-hosted AI services, MCP tool channels, agent-to-agent calls, model-registry downloads, and egress to unapproved AI services. AI gateways, LLM routers, and MCP gateways steer traffic along those paths. The steering decisions and their inputs belong here too: routing policies, MCP server registries, and agent naming and discovery services. | ||||||
| AI Model Model weights, fine-tuning checkpoints, model cards, registries, an AI bill of materials (AIBOM), and the third-party LLMs your enterprise consumes. | ||||||
| Training Data Datasets used for training, fine-tuning, and continued learning. | ||||||
| Runtime AI Data User prompts, inference inputs, RAG content, vector DB content, persistent agent memory, and interaction history. | ||||||
| AI Agent Identities AI agents as non-human principals, plus credentials, keys, permission scopes, service accounts, and delegation chains across agents and tools. |
Kong is an AI gateway that proxies traffic to many LLM providers and governs it with prompt guards, PII sanitization, and content-safety policies that screen requests and responses. It is mapped to the AI Defense Matrix. [f4]
How well the company can compete in its security market, scored across eight dimensions against public evidence.
| Dimension | Score | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Problem Clarity How precisely the company defines its problem, with evidence the problem exists at the scale claimed. | 3/5 | Kong names the buyer, engineering teams putting AI into production, and the pain of controlling access, data leakage and token spend across LLM, MCP and agent traffic. Kong cites a Gartner survey in which 68% of software engineering leaders were already engaged with AI gateways. The buyer problem is clear, with no quantification from multiple independent sources in the cited record. [s1, s5, s13] |
| Capability Depth How specific the technical capabilities are, with evidence beyond marketing claims such as docs and third-party validation. | 4/5 | Kong AI Gateway is documented control by control, from topic blocking and natural-language jailbreak detection to PII redaction before a prompt leaves. Alexander Suchier's June 2025 review on NTT DATA's blog describes open-source and enterprise-only AI plugins. Saurabh Mishra describes the 2.0 architecture on Google Cloud for Google Developer Experts. The Apache-2.0 Kong repository, starred 44.2k times, contains the AI proxy and prompt-guard code. [s2, s25, s26, s16, s24] |
| Market Timing Whether the market is ready for this product, with evidence that buyers are actively seeking solutions. | 3/5 | The enabler is the move from single model calls to agents that call tools and other agents, which Kong described to IT Brief in April 2026 when it launched Agent Gateway, followed by the separate AI Gateway 2.0 runtime in September 2026. Kong cites Gartner's May 2026 Market Overview for AI Gateways, an analyst demand signal within the preceding twelve months. Kong also reports the ADEO and Lombard Odier deployments. The reviewed sources contain one independently documented kind of buyer demand signal. [s5, s3, s13, s21, s10] |
| Team Credibility Demonstrated domain expertise with public signals such as prior exits, publications, and industry recognition. | 3/5 | Co-founders Augusto Marietti, the CEO, and Marco Palladino, the CTO, built Kong's API gateway business, which The Stack reported in November 2024 had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue the year before. That is one verifiable in-domain build with independent reporting, and rung 4 asks for plural builds or a recognized publication record that the reviewed sources do not document. [s6, s7] |
| GTM Proof Evidence of actual traction (customers, revenue signals, partnerships) beyond stated intentions. | 3/5 | Kong names two AI Gateway customers in its own materials: Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank that limits access to external AI services to the gateway, and ADEO, which placed it in front of its LLM providers. Kong's CEO also writes that hundreds of customers proxy traffic through it, and the 700-plus enterprise customers The Stack reported in November 2024 count the whole company. The cited sources contain no independent corroboration of the AI Gateway customer count. [s10, s21, s11, s7] |
| Funding Efficiency Whether funding matches go-to-market ambition, with signs of capital-efficient growth. | 3/5 | The AI Gateway has no capital record of its own, and its economics are not broken out from Kong's, which raised a $175 million Series E in November 2024 for $345 million in total. The line keeps shipping, with Agent Gateway in April 2026 and the separate AI Gateway 2.0 runtime in September 2026, so visible shipping with unconfirmed line economics fits the middle rung. [s6, s5, s3] |
| Category Clarity Whether the company creates or fits a recognizable category that buyers can quickly place in their stack. | 4/5 | Analysts place the product in a named market: Kong's page for Gartner's May 2026 Market Overview for AI Gateways states that Kong is named as a vendor in that category, and Kong's Forrester release quotes the Q3 2026 API management evaluation on the Kong AI Gateway's LLM governance policies. Kong reports both analyst assessments. IT Brief describes the April 2026 launch as part of a market shift toward governance and cost control, which supports a clearly emerging category rather than independently confirmed leadership of it. [s13, s12, s5] |
| Incumbent Defensibility How vulnerable the core value proposition is to absorption as a feature by a platform vendor. | 3/5 | Kong compares its controls with AWS Bedrock guardrails for PII sanitization and Azure API management's GenAI policies for token limits and semantic caching. Deployments add friction to absorbing it: Lombard Odier routes all access to external AI services through the gateway with a custom privacy plugin, and ADEO built its tier in front of LLM providers on it. The cited sources document no data asset or lock-in a bundled cloud gateway could not eventually match. [s23, s10, s21] |
Kong sells Kong AI Gateway to platform and engineering teams that need one place to control how developers, applications and AI agents use large language models. The product page frames the job as controlling access, data leakage and token usage, and extends the same governance to MCP servers and agent-to-agent traffic. Administrators can scope model access and token budgets by team or department, according to Kong's documentation.
Kong supplies most of the problem statements in the cited sources. IT Brief's April 2026 report on the Agent Gateway launch relays Kong's statement that businesses moving AI systems from pilots into production face pressure to monitor usage, control costs and keep audit trails across complex workflows. The reporter's own framing places the launch in a broader shift from model access tools toward governance, monitoring and cost control, which is the market Kong addresses.
The one quantified demand figure is Gartner's. Kong's page for Gartner's May 2026 Market Overview for AI Gateways reports that 68% of software engineering leaders were already engaged with AI gateways, with 15% deployed and 31% rolling them out. That figure establishes a named market with active buyers, though it reaches the record through Kong's page rather than a copy of the report. [s1, s2, s5, s13]
Kong AI Gateway governs model, MCP and agent traffic through controls its documentation names one by one. Kong documents topic blocking and detection of natural-language jailbreak and prompt-injection attempts. The gateway removes personal data before prompts reach providers and screens unsafe responses. It also switches providers, caches results for similar prompts, calculates per-request costs and enforces spending limits. The product page adds token quotas by user, model and time window, MCP access control, and an audit trail for every agent-to-agent call.
Kong rebuilt the product as its own runtime in 2026. Kong AI Gateway first shipped as part of Kong's API gateway, and the July 2026 private beta of AI Gateway 2.0 gave it its own runtime, control plane, admin API and version number. Kong declared 2.0 generally available on September 1, 2026, adding MCP server bundling in which two agents calling the same route can see different tool lists based on who they are.
Part of the implementation is open to inspection. The Apache-2.0 Kong repository on GitHub, starred 44.2k times, contains the AI proxy and prompt-guard plugins, while the pricing page lists the sanitizer, semantic prompt guard and cloud guardrail integrations as paid plugins, an add-on on the Plus plan and included in Enterprise.
Alexander Suchier's June 2025 review on NTT DATA's blog describes open-source and enterprise-only AI plugins on Kong's API gateway. Saurabh Mishra's walkthrough for Google Developer Experts describes MCP tool lists that exclude tools an agent lacks permission to use. Kong's release on the Forrester Wave for API Management Software, Q3 2026, quotes Forrester crediting the Kong AI Gateway with more LLM governance policies than any other vendor in that evaluation. [s2, s1, s20, s3, s16, s24, s4, s25, s26, s12]
Kong competes for the platform team choosing an AI gateway against cloud providers and specialist gateway vendors. Kong's own comparison page sets Kong AI Gateway against AWS Bedrock, Azure API management and Google Apigee, and describes AWS Bedrock guardrails for PII sanitization and Azure's GenAI policies for token limits and semantic caching. The same page compares Kong against the Portkey and LiteLLM gateways.
Kong competes on its reach into buyers it already serves and on the breadth of traffic one product governs. The Stack reported in November 2024 that Kong named more than 700 enterprise customers across its business, and ADEO built on an API foundation supported by Kong before selecting Kong AI Gateway. The product covers LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic under one control plane, which IT Brief reports Kong pitching against rival tools that cover one part of that traffic.
Which vendor a buyer picks depends on whether it keeps AI governance with the team that runs its API infrastructure. A buyer standardized on one cloud can take that cloud's gateway features, and a buyer that treats AI governance as a separate purchase can choose a specialist, so Kong's reach into existing API customers matters where platform teams want the same vendor for API management and AI governance. [s23, s7, s21, s5]
Kong names two customers of the AI Gateway itself, both in its own materials. Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, deployed Kong AI Gateway to manage and monitor access to external AI services, with network policies that allow that access only through the gateway. ADEO, a European home-improvement group, selected Kong in June 2026 to govern its LLM traffic and designed its tier in front of LLM providers on the gateway.
Kong's broader adoption claims are its own. CEO Augusto Marietti wrote in August 2026 that hundreds of customers proxy traffic through Kong AI Gateway and that Kong has processed trillions of tokens. The same post states that less than 1% of organizations running AI through Kong have any AI-specific governance controls in place, including prompt guards, request or response controls, or route-level AI policy.
The company-wide figures describe the parent. The Stack reported in November 2024 that Kong had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue the year before, reached profitability, and named more than 700 enterprise customers including GSK, PayPal and NYSE. The AI Gateway sells into that base, and Konnect Plus can be bought through AWS, so distribution is broad even though the line's own share of it is not measured. [s10, s21, s11, s7, s4]
Kong's founders built the API gateway business the AI Gateway extends. Augusto Marietti is chief executive and Marco Palladino is chief technology officer, and both co-founded Kong, which traces its story to Milan in 2009. The Stack reported that the company passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2023, and Kong's company page states it had grown to more than 500 employees by late 2023.
The team's verifiable record is in API connectivity, and the AI Gateway is its extension into model and agent traffic. That record shows the founders can build infrastructure software and sell it to large enterprises, the same buyers the AI Gateway targets.
Outside investors and filings corroborate the company carrying the line. Kong closed a $175 million Series E in November 2024 at a $2 billion valuation, led by Tiger Global and Balderton according to The Stack, bringing its total raised to $345 million. Kong Inc.'s Form D notice with the SEC reports $79,999,961 of equity sold in an offering whose first sale was on August 6, 2024. [s6, s17, s7, s15]
Kong AI Gateway is itself a control product, so its trust case starts with what it lets a platform team enforce. The documentation describes redacting PII before a prompt reaches the provider and screening unsafe responses, and the product page describes auditing every agent-to-agent call with the caller's identity. Lombard Odier's deployment added a custom plugin that tokenizes or blocks personal data in outgoing prompts.
Kong publishes line-level assurance through its trust center. The SOC 2 Type II report's scope names Kong AI Gateway alongside Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise, and an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate covers Kong's API and AI connectivity platform. Kong states that sensitive reports such as the SOC 2 report can be shared under NDA on request.
The vulnerability affects Kong Gateway Enterprise, which hosted the earlier AI plugins. The NVD record for CVE-2026-6338, published in June 2026, describes an HTTP request smuggling vulnerability in Kong Gateway Enterprise 3.4 and 3.10 through 3.14, the Kong Gateway software on which the AI plugins shipped before AI Gateway 2.0. A buyer evaluating the product can weigh that record against the published attestations. [s2, s1, s10, s9, s14, s20]
| Company | Relationship | Note | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portkey | competes with | Kong's AI gateway comparison page sets Kong AI Gateway against Portkey's gateway, so the two compete for the platform team choosing one control point for model traffic. | N/AWe scored these companies at different scopes, so the totals measure different things. |
| BerriAI | competes with | Competes for the same multi-provider governance buyer. | N/AWe scored these companies at different scopes, so the totals measure different things. |
| NeuralTrust | competes with | Competes for the same buyer of runtime governance over LLM and agent traffic that Kong AI Gateway targets. | N/AWe scored these companies at different scopes, so the totals measure different things. |
| Prompt Security | competes with | Competes for the same enterprise buyer of AI runtime controls that Kong AI Gateway targets. | N/AWe scored these companies at different scopes, so the totals measure different things. |
Add analyzed competitors to compare them side by side with Kong Inc..
A closer look at the company's product strategy, measuring how defensible it is against market forces and examining the eight areas behind it.
press the advantage
Applications and AI agents send their calls to models, tools and other agents through Kong AI Gateway, which has run as its own product, apart from Kong's API gateway, since September 2026. Lombard Odier, a private bank in Switzerland under strict data-protection and audit rules, routes all its outside AI traffic through it, so the bank's software depends on the gateway. The gateway can check prompts for plain-language attempts to manipulate a model and catch unsafe model replies. Its controls enforce rules each customer's team writes, so a customer that leaves would have to rebuild them and re-route its AI traffic. Kong is moving customers from AI plugins on its API gateway to the separate product, and customers who find the move costly could choose another AI gateway instead.
| Dimension | Score | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Value Delivery Does the product sell software as the product, or judgment, trust, or accountability with software as the delivery mechanism. | 1/3 | Kong sells software the customer's platform team operates: guardrails, PII redaction, access policies and cost controls, charged per gateway with a per-model fee on the Plus plan. Kong's account team offers to run a migration, but the customer's team owns the outcomes, which is the software-product level. |
| Switching Cost How expensive leaving is for a customer: data portability, integrations, learned workflows, network effects, regulatory data residency. | 2/3 | Leaving means re-pointing LLM, MCP and agent traffic and rebuilding the policies, budgets and custom plugins a customer configures, and Lombard Odier allows access to external AI services only through the gateway, which is meaningful integration friction. The cited sources document integration friction without estimating the cost or duration of switching vendors. |
| Compliance Moat Whether certifications, liability acceptance, or audit trails block an easy replacement. | 1/3 | Kong's trust center lists a SOC 2 Type II report whose scope names Kong AI Gateway and an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate for Kong's API and AI connectivity platform. A funded rival can obtain the same attestations, and the cited record ties no regulation or authorization to this product that would block a replacement. |
| Problem Complexity Whether the product requires ML, optimization, real-time systems, or years of specialized expertise. | 3/3 | The gateway can inspect prompts and responses inline, catch jailbreak attempts phrased in natural language, cache near-duplicate prompts, and price each request across cache, context-window and service-tier dimensions while translating between model providers. Applying those checks inline on live model traffic is real-time systems work that takes specialized expertise. |
| Buyer Profile Whether buyers are SMB operators, mid-market IT teams, or regulated enterprises and governments with procurement gates. | 3/3 | Kong names a regulated buyer of the AI Gateway itself: Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, deployed it under what Kong's case study calls strict requirements for data protection, auditability and accountability. ADEO, a large European home-improvement group, selected it for its LLM traffic. The Plus plan keeps a self-serve entry, but the named line buyers are regulated and large enterprises. |
| Layer Whether the product is an end-user application, a platform with application features, or infrastructure other applications depend on. | 3/3 | Since AI Gateway 2.0 reached general availability in September 2026, the product runs as its own data plane and control plane rather than as plugins on Kong's API gateway, and applications and agents send model, MCP and agent-to-agent calls through it. Lombard Odier's network policies route the bank's access to external AI services only through the gateway, which makes it infrastructure those applications depend on. |
| Proprietary Data, Content, or IP Whether the product accumulates datasets, content licenses, or IP that a rival cannot recreate from scratch. | 2/3 | Kong’s CEO reports AI Gateway traffic from hundreds of customers and trillions of tokens processed. He draws cross-customer findings from it, such as the share of organizations running AI-specific governance controls and the July 2026 split between Anthropic and OpenAI models. That is an accumulated usage history Kong holds and analyzes, in Kong’s own account. The controls run on configuration the customer writes, and several AI plugins sit in Kong’s public repository, so a rival with time and traffic could build a comparable history. |
Kong aims Kong AI Gateway at engineering and platform teams that govern how developers, applications and agents use large language models across a company. The product page frames the job as controlling access, data leakage and token usage, and the documentation describes scoping model access and token budgets by team or department. That is a shared-infrastructure buyer who serves many internal teams at once.
The two customers Kong names for the gateway belong to regulated and large-enterprise segments. Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, adopted it under what Kong's case study calls strict requirements for data protection, auditability and accountability. ADEO, a European home-improvement group with a turnover of €32.7 billion including tax in 2025, selected it in June 2026 to govern its generative AI use.
Kong also keeps a self-serve entry to the same product. The Konnect Plus plan includes AI Gateway features such as a universal LLM API for up to five models and PII sanitization, and it can be bought through AWS after a free 30-day trial, while Enterprise pricing is custom. Kong pitches Plus at smaller companies starting their API programs, so Kong sells the line both to small self-serve teams and to enterprises buying through sales.
Kong AI Gateway puts named security and governance controls in the path of AI traffic. The documentation lists blocking of disallowed topics, detection of jailbreak and prompt-injection attempts phrased in natural language, PII redaction before a prompt reaches the provider, and screening of unsafe model responses. It also lists switching between providers, semantic caching and per-request cost calculation with spend limits.
Kong separated the product from its API gateway in 2026. AI Gateway 2.0 runs as its own data plane with its own control plane, admin API and version number, and Kong declared it generally available on September 1, 2026. The release added MCP server bundling, in which two agents calling the same route can receive different tool lists based on who they are.
The controls work on configuration the customer writes, and part of the code is public. The Apache-2.0 Kong repository on GitHub contains the AI proxy and prompt-guard plugins, while the sanitizer, semantic prompt guard and cloud guardrail integrations are paid plugins. The cited record names no dataset or model Kong retains for these controls. Kong quotes Forrester crediting it with more LLM governance policies than any other vendor in that evaluation.
Kong sells the AI Gateway into companies that already buy from it and through its own self-serve plans. ADEO's announcement notes that its API foundation was already supported by Kong before it chose Kong AI Gateway for its LLM traffic. Kong Konnect offers a free 30-day trial, and the Plus plan can be bought through AWS, which gives smaller teams a path that does not start with sales.
Kong names two customers of the line and describes adoption beyond them in its own words. Lombard Odier and ADEO are named in Kong's case study and press release. CEO Augusto Marietti wrote in August 2026 that hundreds of customers proxy traffic through Kong AI Gateway. The same post states that less than 1% of organizations running AI through Kong have any AI-specific governance controls in place, such as prompt guards or request and response controls.
The large figures in the record describe the whole company. The Stack reported in November 2024 that Kong had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue the year before and named more than 700 enterprise customers, including GSK, PayPal and NYSE. Kong's release on the Forrester Wave for API Management quotes Forrester noting growing demand for Kong implementations among systems-integrator partners, which is a channel signal for the platform as a whole.
Kong prices the AI Gateway partly inside its Konnect plans and partly as its own charges. The Plus plan is charged per gateway per month and includes a universal LLM API for up to five models, unlimited MCP server proxies, PII sanitization, prompt guardrails and LLM access control. Enterprise pricing is custom and billed annually.
The more advanced AI plugins and the per-model fee make the AI line a separate cost on the Plus plan. The pricing page lists paid AI plugins, among them the AI Sanitizer, AI Semantic Prompt Guard and cloud guardrail integrations, as an add-on on Plus and included in Enterprise. It also charges $100 a month for each unique model the AI plugins proxy on Plus, with custom volume discounts on Enterprise.
The per-model fee ties the AI bill to how many models a customer routes. At $100 a month for each unique model the AI plugins proxy on Plus, a team that routes traffic to more distinct models pays more in proxy charges than one that uses a few.
Kong AI Gateway runs self-hosted or through Konnect, Kong's SaaS platform. The documentation states that AI Gateway supports both Konnect and self-hosted deployments. Lombard Odier ran it in Kubernetes with Kong's ingress controller and restricted access to external AI services so that it flows only through the gateway.
Customers on the older plugin model face a migration. AI Gateway 2.x replaces the plugin-centric model on Kong Gateway with an entity model, and Kong says a later Kong Gateway release will make the AI plugins opt-in rather than bundled. Kong's tooling converts existing configuration into the 2.0 format, and its account team offers to run the migration from a dump of the customer's environment.
AI Gateway 2.0 has its own runtime, control plane and release cadence, so a platform team that also runs Kong Gateway for APIs operates two Kong products after migrating.
Kong publishes assurance that names the AI Gateway directly. Its trust center states that the SOC 2 Type II report covers Kong AI Gateway along with Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise, and that an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate covers Kong's API and AI connectivity platform. Kong states that the SOC 2 report can be shared under NDA on request.
The product's own controls are the core of the line's trust case. The documentation describes redacting PII before it reaches the model provider and catching unsafe responses, and the product page describes auditing every agent-to-agent call with the caller's identity. Lombard Odier layered a custom plugin that tokenizes or blocks personal data in outgoing prompts on top of the gateway.
The software beneath the plugin-based product carries a recent vulnerability. NVD published CVE-2026-6338 in June 2026, an HTTP request smuggling flaw in Kong Gateway Enterprise 3.4 and 3.10 through 3.14, the Kong Gateway software on which the AI plugins shipped before AI Gateway 2.0.
Kong AI Gateway connects to many model providers and extends the same governance to tools and agents. The documentation describes one consistent API across major LLM providers, with providers switched or combined without rewriting an integration, and the 2.0 release added native support for more model platforms alongside MCP server bundling. The product page covers MCP access control and agent-to-agent traffic in the same product.
Kong sells the gateway inside its wider platform, which gives Kong more to sell to the same team. Konnect plans bundle API, LLM, Kafka, WebSocket, gRPC and GraphQL support, and the Plus plan is available through AWS. Kong's open-source repository, starred 44.2k times on GitHub, carries part of the AI proxy code under the Apache-2.0 license.
Kong positions the gateway against cloud providers' own offerings as well as specialists. Its comparison page sets Kong AI Gateway against AWS Bedrock, Azure API management and Google Apigee, and against the Portkey and LiteLLM gateways. The page argues that AWS delivers models only through AWS services, which limits portability, and portability across clouds and providers is the case Kong makes against the cloud offerings.
Kong's co-founders lead the company that builds the AI Gateway. Augusto Marietti is chief executive and Marco Palladino is chief technology officer, and Kong traces its story to Milan in 2009. Kong's company page states it grew to more than 500 employees and passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by late 2023.
The founders' verifiable build is Kong's API gateway business, which the AI Gateway extends. The Stack's November 2024 report on the Series E describes Kong as an API gateway firm whose customers include GSK, PayPal and NYSE. That record shows the team can build infrastructure software and sell it to large enterprises, the same buyers the AI Gateway targets.
Kong has capital behind the line from its company-level funding. It closed a $175 million Series E in November 2024 at a $2 billion valuation, led by Tiger Global and Balderton according to The Stack, bringing its total raised to $345 million.
| Id | Source | Tier | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| f1 | Kong: Secure, Scalable AI Gateway for AI Connectivity | official | 2026-09-23 |
| f2 | Kong Secures $175 Million New Financing at $2B Valuation to Power the API World | official | 2026-09-23 |
| f3 | AI Defense Matrix Catalog entry | other | 2026-06-09 |
| f4 | AI Defense Matrix Catalog mapping | other | 2026-09-23 |
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