How Kong Plans To Use Their Series D Funding

Kong, an API Management Platform provider recently announced their Series D funding of $100m, led by Tiger Global. This funding comes just two years after their Series C round and paves the way for their next growth and development phase.

This article will explore how Kong plans to use their newly acquired funds and how it will help shape the company’s trajectory.

Kong is an API Gateway and Service Mesh provider that uses private and public APIs and services to create efficient, reliable, secure communication between microservices

Overview of Kong

Kong is an API Gateway and Service Mesh provider that uses private and public APIs and services to create efficient, reliable, secure communication between microservices. Founded in 2015, Kong has been solving complex customer demands to securely manage access control, distribute traffic across multiple services or applications, aggregate data, control transformation of the data flow between various systems and help users create overall better applications. Kong has grown rapidly over the past four years through its mission of modernizing legacy application architectures at scale and providing an end-to-end platform for teams to quickly manage all their microservices.

Kong recently announced it had raised $43M in a Series D funding round led by Index Ventures. This latest injection of capital will be used to hone in on Kong’s open source journey with Kong Enterprise, ramp up investments into several areas including support for hybrid environments and adding SaaS offerings on top of existing products. It will also further grow the company’s toolset resources, making software installation easier. The expansion plan also includes new hiring initiatives necessary for the corporate growth strategy that could double or triple headcount over time.

Details of Series D Round

Kong recently announced their new Series D funding round of $100 million, led by Mithril Capital and Contrarian ventures. This brings their total investment to over $200 million.

Kong is a cloud-native software platform that enables companies to quickly build, secure and maintain microservice APIs, which are used to create distributed applications across multiple servers. The platform also includes tools such as Kong Enterprise, Kong Gateway, and Kong Manager which provide additional features for customers.

In this round of funding Kong plans to focus on providing flexible deployment options so that customers can leverage their APIs regardless of the underlying infrastructure, increasing product automation and scalability throughout the ecosystem, expanding its suite of services to further improve developer experience and enable improved integrations with the most popular technologies, as well as improving its observability capabilities such as security and custom metrics.

Kong recently announced it had raised $43M in a Series D funding round led by Index Ventures.

Kong Racks Up $100m Series D in Tiger Global-Led Round

Kong, a platform for building and managing APIs, recently raised a substantial $100m Series D in a Tiger Global-led round. This surge in capital will be used to help Kong’s business model and fuel their growth.

Let’s examine how Kong plans to use their series D funding to further their growth and development.

Overview of Kong’s Business Model

Kong’s business model is focused on allowing developers to create cloud applications more easily and efficiently than previously available. Developers can build, manage and leverage application connectivity (APIs) between services across the distributed web through its platform. In addition, Kong offers solution stacks that provide a complete development infrastructure with core components like an API gateway, serverless computing and analytics.

Kong’s mission is to make it easier to build modern applications by providing a unified abstraction layer for services running in cloud-native environments and traditional monolithic architectures. In addition, Kong seeks to power the future of enterprise application development with open source-based solutions that let developers quickly compose new technology into their applications without needing extensive integrations with traditional middleware systems.

Kong’s platform is designed for scalability: it allows for self-service deployment in any environment without additional configuration or scripting by IT teams or developers. Moreover, the platform supports different architectures including microservices, serverless functions, containers and public clouds like AWS or Azure. This flexibility allows users to easily spin up new applications on its platform or migrate existing environments to leverage its services as they see fit depending on their needs or resources available at any given time.

How Kong Plans to Use the Series D Funding?

Kong Inc. recently closed its Series D funding round, raising $43 million to fuel our product and technology transformation. The new capital will enable Kong to speed time-to-market of new products and capabilities to provide a more comprehensive enterprise service platform. This will include the continued expansion of Kong Mesh, the company’s service mesh technology, which runs across multiple cloud environments and provides visibility into application infrastructure and performance.

Additionally, the funds will enable investment in developing adjacent technologies that allow businesses to unlock more value from their software assets.

The capital will also be used to expand operations in Asia Pacific, where interest in Kong’s products grows as enterprises migrate critical workloads to the cloud. To capitalize on this opportunity and further aid customers’ transition process, Kong plans to increase its presence in Japan, expand partnerships with local providers throughout Asia Pacific, and further invest in support for regional clients.

Finally, these funds will enable the delivery of a richer suite of services for customers that rely on open source technology for their digital transformation projects — such as training and certification programs developed with partners around the world for software engineering personnel undertaking Kubernetes usage assessments or developing expertise in DevOps processes or Infrastructure-as-Code development practices.

Kong’s mission is to make it easier to build modern applications by providing a unified abstraction layer for services running in cloud-native environments and traditional monolithic architectures.

Expansion Plans

Kong, the microservice API platform, announced that it had raised $100 million in its Series D round of funding, led by Tiger Global. The funding will be used to continue to expand its presence globally, develop new products, and introduce operational enhancements to deliver even more value to its customers.

Let’s examine how Kong plans to use its Series D funding to achieve its expansion goals.

Expansion Into New Markets

Kong plans to use its recently closed $100M Series D funding to expand into new markets. The company has already chosen a few strategic international markets, to become an Australia-wide, Asia-Pacific and global platform for API management, microservices, and serverless architectures.

This funding round will go towards introducing Kong’s products to more customers in existing and new markets. The company will also use the funding to develop new cloud technology offerings and deepen its product offering on existing data sources and customer base—driving integrations between multiple clouds on private and public networks.

Kong plans to strengthen its presence in the US by launching services across all 50 states by the end of 2021. Additionally, it intends to expand into Europe over the next calendar year and focus on increasing international staff resources and localizing content for regional market needs. Finally, Kong is actively exploring additional partnerships that can continue to level up their customer experience across established and emerging countries.

Expansion of Product Offerings

Kong plans to use their recent Series D funding round to expand their product offerings and reach new customers. This includes building new features and capabilities in their data platform, launching new core products/services, entering new markets, and expanding product distribution channels.

Kong aims to expand its core platform by incorporating a focus on cloud native architecture, improving scalability, visibility & observability for customers, as well as adding more support for the Kubernetes ecosystem. The company is also exploring ways to tap into commercial markets, focusing on enterprise-level usage scenarios such as enhanced security and performance monitoring products. As Kong continues to gain traction in different sectors across the globe they plan on introducing localized versions of their product while continuing to invest in innovation and research & development efforts.

In addition, Kong plans to extend their product distribution channels by launching a dedicated software developer program and formative partnerships with application infrastructure companies. As part of this initiative Kong will offer its products through existing marketplaces such as GCP Marketplace and AWS Marketplace. On top of that Kong is seeking opportunities to introduce bundling promotions with other third party services which will help drive brand awareness in new areas.

Overall, Kong’s plan for expansion will aim at reaching both developers seeking tools for microservice development, and enterprises looking for more advanced solutions that fully use their cloud native architectures. This should enable them to gain more widespread adoption while having an even bigger impact within the industry they are leading today.

Investment Opportunities

Kong, a leading cloud service platform, recently announced the completion of their Series D funding round. Led by Tiger Global, the round raised $100 Million, which will be used to fuel Kong’s growth and expansion. This financing round will create numerous investment opportunities, such as product innovation, customer support, and hiring more talent. Let’s explore what potential investments are on the horizon.

Through its Series D round of funding, Kong will further invest in current go-to-market (GTM) efforts targeting new enterprise users and markets.

What Investors Can Expect From Kong?

Kong is about to close their Series D funding round and has been developing plans to best use their latest investment. This round of funding brings Kong’s total venture capital to $439 million, so investors hope to see excellent returns.

Kong plans to use the Series D funds for two main purposes — accelerating R&D personnel hiring and international growth. With the additional funds, Kong aims to increase its R&D team by over five times as it ramps up its development of features in its core offering, KONG Connect. This includes growing both the development side — examining service meshes, operation tools, metrics management etc. — as well as exploring new product lines such as serverless computing. Additionally, they plan on investing heavily in international growth initiatives in Asia-Pacific and Latin America which will align with specific cultural preferences and provide tailored services based on local technology advancements.

Given their prior success using venture funding, investors can be confident that this next wave of investment will result in a large return on their original investments and help solidify Kong’s position within the rapidly evolving cloud computing sector.

Potential Return on Investment

Kong plans to strategically allocate the funds raised from their Series D round of funding to drive prioritized areas of focus for 2020. This includes expanding their platform offering, investing in SaaS and API-driven operational efficiency, growing the customer count base, and driving strategic acquisition opportunities. By focusing on these core priorities, Kong intends to optimize its return on investment, and expects strong financial results in the mid to long term.

Through its Series D round of funding, Kong will further invest in current go-to-market (GTM) efforts targeting new enterprise users and markets. In addition, the company plans to invest in sales infrastructure and technology processes; strengthening existing partnerships; hiring of additional people with deep technical knowledge; leveraging more channels of marketing activities such as paid ads targeting an array of market verticals; developing a comprehensive website which can scale globally in servicing customers across geographies; increasing automation affecting lead generation through ‘self serve/no touch/discovery’ methodology; and swiftly scaling up marketing initiatives.

These investments will drive scalability through increased product offerings for customers so that Kong can continue growing revenue efficiently. In addition to this GTM focus, Kong is investing heavily this quarter into various aspects of technological development including core components such as the open source Gateway product , middle layer services such as Analytics & Insights , and Control Plane . These broadened investments into critical product work are expected to positively impact overall revenue generation over time with return on investment being watched closely down the road.

Kong plans to use the Series D funds for two main purposes — accelerating R&D personnel hiring and international growth.

Conclusion

After securing its $100 million Series D led by Tiger Global, Kong has plans to use the funding to continue its mission of helping developers and organizations create connected experiences faster and more securely.

In this article, we have discussed a few of Kong’s goals that the funding will help it achieve. In conclusion, the new funding will likely be a strong boost for Kong to take its platform to the next level.

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