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Kong, the open-source API and life-cycle management firm previously known as Mashape, today announced the launch of a $ 43 million Series C financing round. led by Index Ventures. Previous investors, Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures (CRV), as well as new investors GGV Capital and World Innovation Lab also participated. With this round, Kong has now collected a total of $ 71 million.
The CEO and co-founder of the company, Augusto Marietti tells me that the company plans to use the funds to develop its service control platform. He compared this service to the "nervous system of a company's software architecture".
For the moment, Kong proposes only the first elements. In addition to existing management tools, the company plans to focus on security, an area in which Kong plans to add more machine learning capabilities over time. "It's obviously a 10-year trip, but these two things – immunity to safety and machine learning with [Kong] Brain actually represents 10 years of building an intelligent platform that can handle all incoming and outgoing business traffic, "he said.
In addition, the company also plans to invest heavily in its expansion in Europe and the Asia-Pacific market. This also explains the addition of World Innovation Lab as an investor. After all, the company is focused on bringing American companies into contact with Asian partners, especially Japanese ones. As Marietti told me, the company is currently experiencing significant demand in Japan and China. It is therefore logical to take advantage of this situation, especially since the Chinese market is about to become more easily accessible for foreign companies.
Kong notes that its workforce has doubled in 2018 and now has more than 100 corporate clients, including Yahoo! Japan, Ferrari, SoulCycle and WeWork.
It should be noted that if it is officially an investment in Series C, Marietti thinks it is a Series B round. In fact, the company has seen a major shift in pbading from Mashape to Kong, which was already his main goal. popular open source tool.
"Modern software is now built in the cloud, with applications that consume other applications, service-to-service," said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. . "We are at a turning point in the adoption of microservice architectures by businesses. They are turning to new, open source tools and development platforms to fuel their new wave of innovation. Kong is uniquely positioned to help organizations make that change by supporting the entire service architecture of an organization, whether monoliths or centralized or decentralized microservices. "
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