Keep pulling the thread on Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti.
Mashape raised a $1.5 million seed round led by NEA, co-led by Index Ventures, and with participation from Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt.
Mashape raised a $6.5 million Series A round led by CRV.
In April 2015, after running out of money and taking a $2 million bridge round, Mashape pivoted by open-sourcing its internal API gateway, which became Kong.
Kong crossed the $100 million ARR milestone approximately 1.5 years prior to the podcast recording.
In the year following its Series B round, Kong grew its ARR from $2 million to $10 million.
Martin, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, asserts that Kong is the undisputed independent leader in the API management market.
Augusto Marietti predicts that AI agents will become the primary consumers of the internet, interacting programmatically through APIs rather than through traditional user interfaces.
Kong is building a unified platform for both traditional API and AI-related connectivity, which is expected to converge into a single "broker" layer within the next 2-3 years.
Augusto Marietti predicts that enterprises will adopt a gateway pattern for managing multiple LLMs, abstracting away common functionalities like authentication and rate limiting, similar to the evolution of microservices.
Kong's primary strategic bet is that an "AI Gateway" will become a critical infrastructure component for enterprises to manage and govern hundreds of different LLMs.
Kong's annual "Founders Award" grants 2,555 shares of stock to the company's top employee, symbolizing the 2,555 days (7 years) of struggle before finding product-market fit.
Martin, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes that Kong has ambitions to go public at some point in the future.