Balderton 
- Portfolio News
- 17 December, 2024
The round was co-led by Balderton and Tiger Global, with additional new participation from Teachers’ Venture Growth.
Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, today announced it has closed a $175 million in up-round Series E financing, with a mix of primary and secondary transactions at a $2 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Tiger Global and Balderton, with additional new participation from Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and 137 Ventures among others and continued support from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, and Notable Capital. This brings Kong’s total capital raised to $345 million. Balderton Partner Rana Yared joins the Kong board.
Kong will use the new funds to accelerate its global GTM expansion, enhance product innovation with AI-infused capabilities across AI Gateway, Konnect, Insomnia and all its leading API runtimes such as Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh, while investing in the growth of its customer experience teams.
Kong has shown remarkable growth and vision, particularly with their focus on empowering developers and businesses to harness the power of AI through secure API adoption. Their commitment to innovation and customer success is unmatched, and we believe they are setting the standard for the future of critical digital infrastructure.
Andrea Roda Principal, Balderton
Kong’s unified API platform enables organisations to build AI applications faster while ensuring centralised API security, governance and visibility across all services. As more companies pivot to becoming API-first, Kong provides the critical infrastructure needed to enable secure and scalable AI solutions. With this funding, Kong is poised to continue revolutionising API management and AI integration for organizations globally, empowering businesses to stay ahead in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world.
This funding will fuel our efforts to help any organisation to leverage our unified API platform to manage, secure, and observe both internal and external APIs like never before. As we continue to see a worldwide surge in demand for API calls – propelled most recently by the rise of LLMs – Kong is uniquely positioned to help our customers consolidate disparate API systems to enable “the software assembly line” of the AI era.
