Kong API Summit '25 | Augusto (Aghi) Marietti, Kong

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Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

Co-Founder, CEO & President

Kong

play_circle_outline API Summit 2025: Aghi's Vision for AI Connectivity and the Future of Tokens in API Development

play_circle_outline Unifying AI and API Traffic: Kong's Vision for the Future of Agentic Enterprises in Application Development

play_circle_outline Need for a system of record to manage diverse API and AI gateways.

play_circle_outline Importance of modernizing heritage applications to leverage API and AI advancements.

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Augusto (Aghi) Marietti, Kong

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

Co-Founder, CEO & President Kong

In this interview from the Kong API Summit 2025, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kong, joins theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack a pivotal shift: moving from API calls to tokens in the agentic era. Marietti explains why API traffic and AI traffic are converging and how Kong is building a unified API and AI platform that standardizes connectivity across REST, MCP, events/streaming and more – complete with a true system of record so agents can discover, govern and operate across the enterprise. The discussion covers mo... Read more

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What are the key announcements and shifts discussed at the API Summit regarding the future of APIs and their connection to AI? add

What are the key points regarding the convergence of API traffic and AI traffic? add

What are the challenges and considerations in building a cohesive system of record for APIs and services? add

What are the important considerations for organizations when transitioning from traditional systems to modern digital approaches? add

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Augusto (Aghi) Marietti, Kong

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello, and welcome back to Kong API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm the Practice Lead and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research, covering the app dev practice and all things application and developers. I'm joined today by Aghi. Aghi, how you doing?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thanks for being on. You want to say a little bit about yourself and about Kong?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah, sure. So I'm Aghi, co-founder and CEO of Kong. We're here at the API Summit, our annual conference of all things APIs. So very exciting for having you joining us and share more of our story.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, it's great. It's really exciting. The keynote was an incredible excitement in the room. The announcements that were going on during the event was just really, really powerful. So let's start with just kind of some of the high-level announcements that happened. Can you talk a little bit about some of those announcements?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah. Look, I think we're at this massive dramatic shift. It's an inflection points where, yes, it's all about API traffic, it's about building API platform. But now, we're moving from API calls to tokens.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yep. Yep.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And how we move intelligence is through tokens. And those tokens get moved and consumed through APIs and agents. So it's a whole different era. And so I was very focused to make sure we awake and rise into this moment where we move from just API connectivity, but also AI connectivity. And that is the big shift.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, when I cover in my practice areas, I cover past, present, and future. Right? I cover the adoption of what's coming on with heritage applications and how those heritage applications are moving to modernized approaches. And I've been following Kong for quite some time, right? I mean, my main focus originally was looking at service mesh. And you've grown up to be such a great big opportunity, especially in the API space around the traffic. But when we talk about modernization and we talk about bridging the gap between heritage environment to new, why is Kong kind of at the forefront of that? Because I see that as, like you said, you're shifting from API calls to tokens but in the AI era. Right? But why is that important from a modernization perspective?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Well, look, I think, for example, if you go back to Yellow Pages. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Like 30 years ago. And probably most of the audience weren't even born then, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> But that was the first way where business would've a programmatic, somewhat programmatic way to get contacted. You put your phone number, you put your emails. And then the online boom came out. The internet boom came out, and we moved those into websites. And there was no API back then. And then Steve Jobs goes on stage, not this stage, and he creates the App Store era, and we just ran a bunch of applications. And that's the beginning where we built all these APIs behind the scene to power, make sure we're part of this new medium. Then we start to build developer platform. We wanted our APIs to be internal, external, to get programmatic access, and all of that. And now, we're going to the agentic era. So why does it matter? It's just another medium. Every business will become agentic. It's more about do you want to be part of it or you want to be Yellow Pages?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, and I agree. I mean, when I see, in my own research, I see that 54% of organizations are using AI in their production workload. And that stat's probably even dated. I think there's probably more than that being used in AI in their production workloads. What I was really excited about in these announcements that I've seen in the keynote and then at the event, the conversations from the customers is the future of where this is going. Let's talk a little bit about the vision and the future. What's your vision and future of where Kong has taken the AI approach?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah. Look, I think the big bet is API traffic and AI traffic will converge.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Okay.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And that's more important than ever to have a unified API and AI platform that helps to manage both type of traffics. We go from just API for RESTful, OpenAPI spec'd. We go through MCP server. We have HOAs. We're going event streaming, HTP streaming, server-side event. There is just a proliferation of different endpoints. It's not just Swagger files.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And so this is number one. Number two, you need to have a system of records. And the crowd here in the room, they knew about this. They knew that, yeah, we're trying to build a system of record of APIs and services, but reality, that never happened because people were buying... We do APIs to make things Konnect, but then you buy five different systems that don't Konnect to each other.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> That's insane.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> That's insanity. To say, well, in reality, there was never a technology that allow you to have different gateways for whatever it is the team needs. So we bring the first ever technology that has one gateway, or you say one mesh, or one AI gateway, or one event gateway for whatever flavors you need, and then we bring it all together. Why does it matter now? Because AI and agentic workflow are horizontal. They don't go just on one business unit powering one apps, but they go across the enterprise. So how you go across the enterprise? You have to have a universal standardized railroads. But to do that, you have to have a system of records. So that's, I think our bet, our vision of AI traffic and API traffic are merging. That's why you need a system of records so the agents can go and roam free on top and manage it all. Then you still need a platform for security, discoverability, all that. But now, it's for machines.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And then when we look at the connectivity, you were talking about all these almost silos of activity that were happening, and that's not the right way to run it. You need to be more holistic across your ecosystem.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> There's a lot of-

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Do you know why?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Go ahead.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Because if you're not there, the agents cannot find you.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> They cannot get considered. They're going to be left out.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. But see, but that's just it though. I mean, I think because the change that's been happening, say in even the last six months to a year has been so rapid and so... It's changing. The evolution of agents and AI and innovation is changing very, very rapidly. When you look to the organizations that are a little bit hesitant on doing this, what would you advise to them and saying like, okay, they've built their existing data pools, their existing data sets, data's their business. Right? Those now become the new LLMs or SLMs that they have. Right? Now, you have agents that sit on top and they're going to connect into these things. If they're not even sure how to get going on it, I guess what I'm thinking is what I really liked in the story that I've been hearing throughout the day is Kong is meeting the clients where they are in their own journey. So whether they're fully mature or just starting, you have an answer to get in.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Can you maybe expand a little bit about that.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Well, look, there are the world is a different stage of evolution. So is our customer, our partners. You want to meet them where they are.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And some people are still on mainframe with our wrapper API on top. That's fine. We have the gateway for that. You just download and run it on prem. Some folks are running entirely on whatever, AWS. We have the gateway for that. Some others are forced on event streaming with Kafka. We got the gateway for that. Others are entirely LLM and agentic driven teams. We have the gateway for that. So you just want to meet where they are, but then whatever comes next, we have the next play, we have the next app, we have the next game, and then it all comes together under the same platform. You don't need to buy different platforms. We spoke a lot about monetization today, because this is all digital assets that needs to be consumed. But at some point, some of them will be sold. In fact, we hear from Entropy, they're already making billion dollars through their APIs and they will make 10 and 100. It's just going to keep growing. So what we can provide billing, metering and enforcement in the same platforms. It's unique and this doesn't exist anything like that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I had Ross and Peter on right before we were just talking, they were talking a lot about the open meter and the announcements around monetization of the APIs. It really is interesting. And I will say this, it's not a new concept, but what you're talking about and what you're doing is really innovative for the next generation of AI, where it's coming. So that I think is people need to understand the differences between what they used to do and what they're doing now. And bridging the gap between old and new is important, right? Because people are built on their heritage systems. They're trying to move forward and they need to know how they can do that.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah. I think there's this thing, like I say, again, you want to meet the prospect into the customer, our partner, where they are, because it's a very long journey. Right? They're going from digitalizations, API first to digital first. It will be AI first, and you want to give an entry point to help them to be helpful to add value at that moment in time, and then go from there. And that's the bridge between building applications powered by microservices, all the way into building agentic enterprises powered by LLMs. We want to be the traffic layer, the connectivity layer for both. And I think if this team with this crowd, with this community gets into the AI connectivity game, it's a whole different priority.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Oh, I agree. But one of the other things I found interesting, just walking the halls here and talking to different folks, I was expecting to see the more of the practitioners. Right? A lot of the developers. And what I'm actually seeing is there's business users here. They're trying to figure out from themselves, "Is this the right bet? Do I move in this right direction?" And when I look at the opportunity that Kong's presenting here and the vision, what do you see as the biggest opportunity, especially when we start talking about the AI era? What is the biggest opportunity?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Like you mentioned, we have meetups around the world that is more for developers. Here it is 80% about the architects leader, platform engineering leader, VP of clouds, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> We are about business, more on the business value. There is some developers grassroots, and we do build with a developer's first mindset anyway.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> But this conference about getting together the hearts of minds of technology, business leader from architects to vice president, CIO, CTO, and that's one of the key pillars of the conference.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. The conversations were more solution-oriented.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Right. Right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And that's why I was thinking it's like they're solving the next generational problem.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> You're right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's why I was asking when I think about the next opportunity, the biggest opportunity, in my mind, I think some of your announcements, like whether it's Volcano and the SDK that's coming out, right? Or if it's the monetization.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah. Volcano is... Tomorrow, we have an impressive lineup of announcements on day two, a lot on MCP. We're going to launch the first integration MCP, raise our head of products. We'll have tremendous lineup. Today, we focus on the AI gateway with the new release, which is LLM, an MCP gateway built in so you can manage the traffic. We have that demo where you can order a coffee like that. And then as a side, on the builder side, we launch Volcano SDK, which is really the first TypeScript SDK to build MCP-powered agents in a few minutes. And I think that's the future, because most of the apps of the future, maybe they don't have graphical interface anymore. And so having just prompt few things eventually and build an agent, that will be I think the next evolution. We want to be the first and that's was Volcano SDK launched today to allow us to build agents like this.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I think that that's important. I think it's especially for your ecosystem because this is definitely an area that you're going to be growing and you got to build out that ecosystem.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So the Volcano.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Have you tried it?

Paul Nashawaty

>> I have looked at it on Volcano.dev. Right?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Nice.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And I read on in GitHub. Right? I know that's available there and that's where you can download it if you want to go get it. So that's where you can get it. But no, very cool, very cool stuff. So when we look at the importance of enabling APIs to enable the future of AI, we talked a little bit about it. I know that there's different approaches when you have MCP servers. Right? And you have a to a approaches and then you have custom agents that vendors are making. What I really like about Kong's approach is the ability to be a little bit more agnostic. Right? You were talking about pulling the pieces together that you want. So it's almost like building the recipe. Right? You're putting all the pieces together and making it work. Can you talk a little bit about that and why if somebody's using maybe some heritage environments, how they can map to moving more toward the future?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> So when I said we're the only technology in the world, I really believe so. Our platform, our API and AI platform is built in a programmatic way.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> So the management plane is actually programmable and you can add more and more runtimes underneath over time, but you also can add more and more apps or agents on top. But it all comes together to the core platform services. So if tomorrow there is a new protocol, entire new dimension, we can launch a gateway very fast and put under the same platform that you've been using for years to manage API traffics. And we will build an application specific or a manager specific for that type of traffic. So that's unique, where Rome, I grew up in Rome and Rome say all the roads leads to Rome. Here, all the roads leads to Konnect.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Konnect.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> It all comes together, whatever comes next, you're safe proof to the future. We have the platform we keep growing. And that doesn't really exist, anything like that. So if for example, you want to see analytics and observability, but you want to trace how an API call is impacting a token over here, what are the gross margins? Because we are full stack of the end-to-end from the server to the client, we can see the whole traffic. We can always give a universal observability from an API call to a token in the same platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So that's the big push right now for the unified.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> That's the big push.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, the big-

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Is before it used to be unified API platform because it was about unifying different, I say different management system together to have an API system of records. Now, it's about unified API and AI platform together.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I agree. So the other thing that I found incredibly important to talk about is security and compliance. Security and compliance is key because when you start looking at, well one, security and compliance is just key in general. Right? But when you start looking at the next generation of applications being created, there's all sorts of rules and things that are being... For example, the EU CRA, that's something that's going into effect. And so, if those rules are not followed, then you have some serious issues.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yes. I think governance is a problem. Like, okay, you want to expose all this stuff, where do... I said at the keynote, so my big believer that history repeats itself in some shape or form. In the microservices era, you saw it. We went from monolith to microservices. We start to decouple thing and we start to build connectivity logic in our backends. At some point, it was 100, 200, 1,000. We stopped and we moved to a gateway as a traffic and we start to manage it there. So governing and security was up the traffic layer. LLM is going to happen the same way. You had one LLM, you build your framework link chain or whatever. Now, we have 10, 20, hundreds of those and we're moving back again to the traffic layer as a pattern with an AI gateway. So it's history repeating itself where you're just control managing API traffic and tokens, but it goes back to the traffic layer. That's the big bet we think versus keep building connectivity logic into the LLMs or in the backends.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Gotcha you. Yeah. No, I agree.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> In fact, LangChain, it's not spiking anymore. And I think one of the reasons is too many LLMs are not going to write guardrails 100 times. Just put guardrails into the gateway and that's it, once.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. No. I-

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And dispatch everywhere.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree. And I also think that organizations are looking at it and trying to limit their number of calls because it costs money, it costs a lot of money to do it. So and understanding those calls to make sure that works appropriately is important to understand as well.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> What do you see when some of these, I guess I'm thinking organizations that are hesitant to try, how do you get them to feel confident in trying?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> To try AI or to try APIs?

Paul Nashawaty

>> The APIs so they can adjust to these new bond approaches.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Look, our platform is free to start. And I think people, once they have APIs, they can just try it out, Konnect and don't even to set a credit card or nothing. They have a very strong free trial and they can try it out. I think that would be the first. But remember, it's technology, it's process, it's people, it's not just tools.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And I think we focus all the time providing the best technology, but it's also, it's about people and it's about the culture and the process and also helping either through our partner, our GSI partner to helps really transform the company, not just from here's the best tech, but how we can streamline process and elevate the culture of the company.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I like the way you just said there, because you're right. It is about people, process and technology. Actually what I'm finding in my own research with theCUBE, I'm finding that 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists and they're pushing back on the vendor community to reduce the friction. Right? And that's what I saw here is reduction in friction. You reduce the complexity, but because of skill gap issues, they also want to work with solutions, service delivery partners. Right? So you mentioned you have the GSIs that you work with that are building out these solutions. That's another-

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> That's very important, especially when you're doing... Here, we're not like, "Hey, here's the database." Here, we're talking about enterprise transformation, not just digital transformation, AI transformation.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> It's a massive movements that it can not just, "Hey, here's the tool." It's a lot of people, it's a lot of hours, it's a lot of process. And that needs to be written for the agentic era and we leverage a lot of our partners, our GSI to help do this. Right? So we can stay focused on just build the best technology and then bring the best partner to help transform our customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So where would you advise? You mentioned it's easy to get started, right? It's easy to just jump on. And where would you think that a year from now, right? We're going to be sitting here, you and I are going to be talking, right? And we're talking about the API Summit in 2026.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Would be a million people.

Paul Nashawaty

>> A million people? Well, that's fine. That's great. So I was going to ask, what do you want it to look like? Right?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Look, at the end, this is a... We haven't done it. Last time we did live was 22. So then it was online. This is a return to live events. So definitely want to do a live again, bigger and better. And this is a long journey. And every Sunday we learn something. But being together, being live is like no question. It's about people, process and tool. Right? So having the people that you can talk and get real-time feedback and correlate and you don't get this, you don't get high way conversation on a online events.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> And I think that's the biggest value for me, particularly to talk with customers and get their life feedback.

Paul Nashawaty

>> What else would you like the audience to know? What didn't we talk about that you would want the audience to know about that they should probably feel and listen to?

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> That we haven't talked yet about it?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Well, tomorrow there's a lot of MCP on Konnect. Today we focus on Volcano. We had the AI gateway, but we hear from Marco Moore. But tomorrow is a lot about Konnect and I think we're going to announce an agent.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Little preview for tomorrow.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> First AI agents, yeah, for APIs to make you a superhero as a platform leader. Maybe the best would be if they get a promotion, right? They start to use this agent. It gives you all this insight. They go show to their manager, "Oh, this is awesome." Boom, promoted. That will be the advice. So I think those are very exciting part that we'll see tomorrow on day two. We also have Kurzweil coming as a chat. He was there, that a wrote a book, The Singularity, where AI and machines will merge with humans and become smarter. And he wrote it like 30 years ago. That's crazy because now that's all we talk about it. But he saw it 30 years ago. So that's another interesting one that I think is we're going to find out more tomorrow.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Excellent. Excellent. Well, Aghi, this has been great. I really appreciate you being on.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Thank you, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> This has been great. I think the event is really exciting. There's so much buzz in the hallways and so much conversations. That really been awesome.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thanks.

Augusto (Aghi) Marietti

>> Thanks, Paul, for having me and thanks for coming.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you for being on. And thank you for the audience for watching. I am Nashawaty coming to you live from the show floor at Kong API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.