Kong

Kong Inc. operates a unified API and AI connectivity platform that lets organizations secure, manage, accelerate, monetize, and cost-control API, event, LLM, and MCP traffic. Its product family includes Kong API Gateway, Kong AI Gateway, Kong Event Gateway, Kong Konnect, Kong Insomnia, and usage-based metering and billing capabilities.

The platform spans five functional areas: building and testing agents and connecting them to enterprise context; full API lifecycle management from design and testing through publishing and monetization; event management that standardizes how agents and applications integrate with real-time data streams; monetization and cost governance for token and API consumption, including entitlements and runtime limits; and developer productivity tooling for designing, testing, and publishing API and AI products through a self-serve developer portal. Positioning emphasizes a shift from an "API call economy" associated with cloud-native architectures to a "token economy" driven by agentic AI, with capabilities such as token budgets, semantic caching, and context window handling alongside traditional gateway features like rate limiting and dynamic caching.

Business model

Kong sells its platform to enterprises and developer teams, offering a free tier for Kong Konnect alongside sales-assisted enterprise engagement via demo booking and a contact-sales motion.

Software platform sold to enterprises, with product features for usage-based metering and billing that customers use to monetize their own APIs and AI products.

Traction

Customer-reported outcomes published by the company include 15% faster development at United Airlines, 50% faster time-to-market at HSBC, a seven-week migration at BMW, roughly 60% lower development costs at DELTA Fiber, and 2.4 billion requests per month at SeatGeek. The company also cites 10 million API keys generated and more than 1 trillion API and AI requests.