Jibran
Habib

The API Economy's Quiet Architect

There's a company you've never heard of that powers software you use every day. Kong Inc. - born as Mashape in a Milan garage in 2009 - became the go-to API gateway for the world's largest enterprises. Every time a cloud service talks to another cloud service, there's a good chance Kong is in the middle of that conversation.

Jibran Habib is the CEO at the center of that conversation. Operating out of Islamabad in Pakistan, he runs an organization with 800 employees spread across 25 countries, a $2 billion valuation, and a product suite that enterprise engineering teams depend on to keep the lights on. The fact that most consumers will never know Kong's name is almost the point - infrastructure that works tends to be invisible.

The company he leads raised $175 million in November 2024, led by Tiger Global and Balderton Capital, with continued backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CRV, and Sapphire Ventures. The round wasn't about survival; it was acceleration - into AI gateways, global market expansion, and the next generation of API management that handles not just traffic between services, but traffic between humans and large language models.

In 2009, two Italian developers started building something in Milan. They called it Mashape - an API marketplace where developers could find, share, and monetize APIs like apps in an app store. The idea was ahead of its time. The execution was scrappy and ambitious. It attracted 250,000 developers.

Then Mashape built an internal tool to manage its own APIs. They called it Kong. It ran on Nginx. It was fast, extensible, and genuinely useful. In 2015, they open-sourced it. Enterprises immediately started using it to manage their own API traffic at scale.

By 2017, the company had a decision to make: keep running the marketplace or bet everything on the gateway. They sold the marketplace to RapidAPI and renamed the company Kong Inc. The API gateway was now the entire company. It turned out to be the right call by every metric.

Today, Kong Gateway powers thousands of enterprises - from Fortune 500 financial institutions to healthcare systems to cloud-native startups. It handles authentication, rate limiting, load balancing, observability, and increasingly, AI model routing. Jibran Habib leads an organization that processes an almost incomprehensible volume of API traffic, quietly, every second of every day.

The framing of Kong as an "API gateway company" undersells what's actually happening. When enterprises started running large language models in production - not as experiments, but as actual business processes - they ran straight into the same problems Kong already solved for microservices.

How do you rate-limit calls to an AI model? How do you rotate between different models based on cost or availability? How do you cache semantically similar prompts to avoid redundant API calls? How do you inject security guardrails into the prompt pipeline? How do you track costs across 50 different AI services?

These are API management problems. Kong had already built the infrastructure. The company rebranded the category - calling itself the "AI Connectivity Company" - and extended its gateway to handle AI traffic with specialized plugins for prompt security, semantic caching, AI response enrichment, and model switching. The $175 million Series E was partly a bet that this positioning was correct.

Jibran Habib operates this company from Islamabad, part of a distributed leadership structure that mirrors Kong's own product philosophy: the control plane can be anywhere, as long as the data plane is everywhere that matters.