Kong Inc.


Kong Inc. offers open-source platforms and cloud services to manage, monitor and scale Application Programming Interface and Microservices. The main products offered are: Kong, an open-source API and Microservices management solution, Galileo, a platform for API analytics and debugging, Gelato, a platform for the creation of developer portals for APIs and Microservices, and API Marketplace, a marketplace for discovering and publishing cloud APIs.

History

The original product was first developed in 2009 in Milan, Italy and first incorporated in the US as Mashape, Inc. Founded by Marco Palladino, Augusto Marietti and Michele Zonca, the original project was a mash-up platform used to aggregate different functions and UI elements from third party products and services. While developing the product for a year, the team dealt with a lot of APIs, and decided to create a unified hub to organize the growing market of APIs. In 2010, the team started the development of the first API marketplace. Mashape appeared online in November 2010 as an Alpha product and launched in private Beta in June 2011. The team raised the first funds in the US.
In 2010, Mashape received its first angel funding from individuals including Max Sgrelli. In 2011, the company then raised $1,500,000 in seed funding. Mashape then rejected some acquisition offers in 2011.
In 2011 the company reached 100 APIs. Mashape moved to private beta on June 2, 2011 while supporting 110 APIs. Three months after, the company reached 200 APIs during the first week of September 2011. As of June 2016 the Mashape Marketplace counted about 250,000 developers.

Technology

In 2015, Mashape released Kong, an open-source management layer for APIs and Microservices that is built on top of Nginx and Cassandra/PostgreSQL with the claim of improving performance and reliability. Kong is the main engine of Mashape's marketplace.