How Kong Was Born: APIs, Hustle, and the Future of AI Infrastructure

Augusto Marietti traces Kong’s origin from a “make it or break it” scramble to raise a small round in the U.S. after arriving from Italy on a tourist visa. He describes cold-emailing hundreds of investors, sleeping on Travis Kalanick’s couch, living on about $1,000 a month, and surviving on rice, beans, tuna, and pasta while the company was still effectively a three-person experiment. The core early lesson was that the original API marketplace idea did not fit the market, so the team pivoted after a long period of starvation to the API gateway and infrastructure model that became Kong.

He says the company’s breakout only came after years of struggle, followed by an open-source release in 2015 and a bridge round that kept the business alive for only weeks. That open-source moment, plus intense user pull, helped Kong break out, raise further capital, and become an independent leader in API infrastructure. He also recounts help from people like Sam Altman, and investor conviction from CRV, Index, NEA, and others as the product evolved.

The second half of the conversation focuses on AI and why Augusto thinks it strengthens Kong’s position. He argues that AI agents will consume the internet through APIs and protocols, making connectivity, authentication, authorization, key management, and traffic governance more important. In his view, API and AI traffic are converging into a unified infrastructure layer, and the long-term bet is that enterprises will need a gateway-like abstraction to manage many models and many agent interactions.