The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Charles Rivers Ventures (CRV), as well as new investors GGV Capital and World Innovation Lab (WiL). This new round follows record growth in 2018, in which Kong drove a significant increase in year-over-year bookings, doubled headcount, reached 100 Kong Enterprise customers, including Yahoo! Japan, Ferrari, SoulCycle and WeWork, and hit more than 54 million downloads of open source Kong. With the Series C, Kong has now raised $71 million to date.

Kong will use the funds to deliver the industry's first service control platform that acts as the nervous system for an organization's modern software architectures by intelligently brokering information across all services. The company will also invest in international expansion including Asia Pacific and Europe, build out its go-to-market capabilities and team to support increasing demand for Kong technology, and grow the Kong open source community.

"It's been a privilege to work with Kong and its fantastic team, and see them evolve from a small company to a market leader, with the potential to become the 800-pound gorilla in open core development," said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. "While Kong has enjoyed a lot of success to date, the microservices evolution is still in its early innings. Thousands upon thousands of applications will have to migrate to a microservices architecture, and Kong is at the epicenter of this movement."

The way software is created is undergoing a revolution as Global 5000 organizations transition to new, distributed software architectures for modern applications that demand massive scalability, cross-platform support and the ability to process real-time streams of data in motion. By 2022, IDC predicts 90 percent of all new applications will feature microservices architectures and leverage third-party code, and 35 percent of all production applications will be cloud-native. An estimated 500 million new logical applications will be created between 2018 and 2023, fueled by rapid adoption of containers and agile methods.

The Kong Service Control Platform is designed for the modern era of software development and seamlessly connects APIs and microservices across cloud-native, hybrid, and on-prem environments to make it easy for developers to create scalable, microservice applications that drive business growth. Powered by a high-performance, open source core and enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the Kong Service Control Platform will enable end-to-end service lifecycle management - from pre-production to post-production - to support customers building and managing innovative products and services.

"Kong's mission is to solve one of the biggest technical challenges in the 21st century by delivering a platform that intelligently connects and secures data in motion at a massive scale, with optimum performance and reliability," said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. "This funding will allow us to continue to help Global 5000 companies transform themselves into digital enterprises as they shift away from monolith legacy systems towards decentralized, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures."

Supporting Quotes:

"Modern software is now built in the cloud, with applications consuming other applications, service to service," said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "We're at the tipping point of enterprise adoption of microservices architectures, and companies are turning to new open source-based developer tools and platforms to fuel their next wave of innovation. Kong is uniquely suited to help enterprises as they make this shift by supporting an organization's entire service architecture, from centralized or decentralized, monolith or microservices."

"There's been significant market traction in open source business models, particularly in the container and microservices space as more companies use these services for digital transformation," said Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at CRV. "We believe Kong is strongly positioned for success, as they can help organizations whether they are working with a monolith or microservices architecture-or a combination of both."

"At GGV Capital, we seek to invest in companies creating the next wave of business innovation," said Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital. "GGV is thrilled to be part of Kong's delivery of new, open core developer technology that makes it easier for app developers to create scalable, high-performance applications that drive business growth."

"Kong and World Innovation Lab both share the same vision of a next generation of modern business," said Rob Theis, general partner, World Innovation Lab. "We are excited to help accelerate Kong's growth including in Japan, where they already have great customers embracing Kong's service control platform. Together, WiL and Kong will empower leading companies across the globe to build enduring businesses."

Key Takeaways:

Kong Inc. was launched in August 2017
75+ million downloads of Kong makes it the most widely used open source API platform
110+ Enterprise customers to date
$43 million Series C funding raised
$71 million in total funding raised to date

About Kong Inc.
Kong delivers a next-generation API and service lifecycle management platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Offering high flexibility, scalability, speed and performance, Kong enables developers and Global 5000 enterprises to reliably secure, connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for modern applications. Kong is building the future of service control platforms to intelligently broker information across services. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com/ or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.