How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure
Augusto Marietti, CEO of Kong, shares his remarkable founder story, from arriving in the US with $600 to building a category-leading API infrastructure company. He details the seven-year struggle of the initial company, Mashape, the critical pivot to open-sourcing their internal API engine which became Kong, and the explosive growth that followed. Marietti also provides his vision for the future, where APIs serve as the essential connectivity layer for a new generation of AI agents, transforming how machines interact with the internet.
The Founding Journey: From Milan to Silicon Valley
Augusto Marietti’s journey began with a 90-day make-or-break mission to the US on a tourist visa with his co-founders. Arriving with only $600, their goal was to raise funding or return to Italy. The initial breakthrough came from an unconventional tactic: after attending a Stanford entrepreneurship event, they took the paper registration list and spent the night cold-emailing 400 investors. This effort yielded a few meetings and eventually their first check for $17,000 from a member of YouTube’s founding team.
The negotiation for their first $51,000 angel round famously took place in Travis Kalanick’s kitchen, with Kalanick himself coaching the young founders. He advised them, “if this guy leaves, you’re never going to see them again and nor the money,” forcing them to negotiate a deal on the spot. This initial funding kicked off a period of extreme frugality. The three founders had to survive in San Francisco on a shared $1,000 a month. Marietti recounts their diet of “rice, beans, and tuna,” a combination chosen for the optimal balance of carbohydrates and protein at the lowest possible cost. Without legal work status or social security numbers, they worked out of Starbucks and lived on mattresses, a testament to their early struggle.
The Pivot from Marketplace to Infrastructure
The original company, Mashape, was conceived as an API marketplace, an “assembly line” for developers to build applications using a drag-and-drop interface. However, the founders soon realized the model was fundamentally flawed for several reasons:
- Lack of a Long Tail: Unlike successful marketplaces like Airbnb, the API economy was dominated by a few powerful players (e.g., Stripe, Twilio), not a large number of low-power suppliers.
- No Exclusivity: Developers could easily bypass the marketplace and go directly to the API provider’s website.
- Quality and Trust Issues: As a cloud marketplace, Mashape couldn’t guarantee the quality or uptime of the third-party APIs, yet they were often blamed for failures.
The economics never worked, and after raising a Series A, the business stalled. Facing dwindling funds, they made a critical decision. The most valuable asset they had built was not the marketplace itself, but the powerful API engine running behind it—an API gateway that handled authentication, rate limiting, routing, and logging for thousands of APIs. In April 2015, with only a few weeks of runway left and sustained by a $2 million bridge round from their investors, they open-sourced this engine and named it Kong.
Breakout Growth and Building the API Assembly Line
The launch of open-source Kong was an immediate success. The project took off, gaining significant traction within the developer community. This momentum allowed them to raise a Series B from Andreessen Horowitz, closing the round just weeks before they would have run out of money.
What followed was a period of explosive growth. The company, rebranded as Kong Inc., grew from under $1 million in ARR to $10 million in a single year. This success was driven by major market shifts: the move from on-premise to the cloud and the architectural transition from monoliths to microservices. These trends created a massive need for a decentralized, scalable API infrastructure, and Kong was perfectly positioned as the control plane to manage the proliferation of APIs.
To commemorate their difficult journey, the company established the “Founders Award,” granting 2,555 shares of stock to the top employee each year. The number is symbolic, representing the 2,555 days—or seven years—of struggle they endured before Kong’s breakout success.
The Future: APIs as the Backbone for AI
Marietti believes the industry is at the beginning of another massive shift driven by AI. He posits that AI agents will become the primary consumers of the internet, interacting not through graphical user interfaces but through programmatic interfaces—APIs. “You cannot do AI if you’re not API first,” he states. “It’s just you don’t have the mouth and the ears to a model.”
In this future, the distinction between API traffic and AI traffic will converge. Managing AI interactions at scale will require solving the same “boring” infrastructure problems that Kong solves for traditional APIs: authentication, authorization, key rotation, billing, and observability. Marietti draws a parallel to the evolution of microservices:
“The same thing I think is going to happen in LLMs… eventually, same thing happen in microservices, you will abstract that to a gateway pattern once again. And that’s where I think an AI gateway will have the same analogy.”
Kong is positioning itself to be this unified connectivity platform for both API and AI traffic, providing the essential infrastructure for enterprises to manage and govern hundreds of LLMs and AI agents securely and efficiently.
Lessons for Founders
Reflecting on his journey, Marietti offers several key pieces of advice for entrepreneurs:
- Persevere: He was driven by a powerful fear of failure, stating he could never visualize himself returning to Italy defeated. This mindset prevented him from ever considering giving up.
- Play the Long Game: Success often takes much longer than anticipated. It’s crucial to commit to a durable, decade-long trend that provides enough time to make mistakes, learn, and grow.
- Survive: In the early days, the most important rule is to keep the burn rate low and avoid running out of money. “Don’t die. Don’t quit.”