Kong API Summit '25 | Paul Nashawaty, theCUBE Research

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Paul Nashawaty

Practice Lead and Principal Analyst

theCUBE Research

Kong API Summit analysis: API monetization hits go-time in the agentic era

Application programming interfaces are not just a hot-button topic in tech; API monetization is clearly dominating boardroom discussions. As agentic agents enter the workforce at scale, enterprises are turning to singular control planes that can adapt to a new economy and keep return on investment measurable.At Kong’s API Summit, the company emphasized unification and security while extending support across AI agents and event data. Announcements ranged from open-sourcing the Volcano software development kit for Model Context Protocol-powered agents to adding support for said agents across Konnect – positioning governance and revenue operations alongside core gateways

Kong debuts tools for metering and monetizing APIs and AI agents

The API technology Kong Inc. announced a flurry of innovations this week at its annual developer conference, headlined by a new offering that enables companies to make money from their application programming interfaces, data streams and artificial intelligence models.The new offering is called Kong Konnect Metering and Billing, and it’s powered by technology from OpenMeter that was acquired by Kong just over a month ago. It’s meant to help businesses create new revenue streams by turning digital assets into a steady source of income

play_circle_outline Konnect positioned as a unified platform for APIs, AI, agents, and event streams.

play_circle_outline Key announcements included MCP support for secure, governed, and scalable development.

play_circle_outline Kong Identity announcement for enhanced API identity management and machine-to-machine authentication.

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Paul Nashawaty, theCUBE Research

Paul Nashawaty

Practice Lead and Principal Analyst theCUBE Research

In this keynote analysis from the Kong API Summit ‘25, theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty breaks down how Kong is positioning Konnect as a unified platform for APIs, AI, agents and event streams – laying the groundwork for the agentic AI era. Nashawaty unpacks the major announcements around security, governance, monetization and unification designed to help enterprises securely scale AI- and agent-driven workloads. He highlights data points from theCUBE Research, including that 54% of production applications are already incorporating AI and that 68% of organiz... Read more

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome to Kong API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm the practice lead and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and I cover app dev. And I'm coming to you live from the show floor at the event. So, there's a lot happening at the show today. There's a lot to unpack and a lot to discover and talk about here. So, when we look at API Summit 2025, it really does mark an evolution for Kong, right? Kong is positioning Konnect to be the unified platform for APIs, AI, agents and event streams. So, there's a lot going on here with building the infrastructure of the agentic AI era. That's the theme of the show. That's the theme of the event. The keynote was carrying this forward, but there's a lot of announcements that we want to talk about here. And the announcements were focused on security, governance, monetization was a big factor, and unification, enabling enterprises to really securely scale AI and agent-driven workloads. But when we think about all the announcements, let's talk about what they are and then go from this perspective. AI and MCP announcements were big. Ecosystem monetization and event-driven announcements were also really big. So, let's unpack each one of these and drill it down and then talk about what this means. When Kong announced Konnect MCP support, it was really about enabling secure governed and scalable agentic development. Really, this is about introducing the MCP gateway capabilities and Kong's API gateway really for Konnect Developer Portal, right? So, adding that together and then bringing it in, it addresses the key enterprise challenges around security, reliability, performance, and agentic workloads overall. So, really, honing in on the agentic play here and the buzz in the market. What we see in our own app dev research, we see 54% of production applications are incorporating AI in their workloads, so this is not surprising that Kong went in this direction, right? But the core innovations that were announced is to consistent MCP server, auto-generation from Kong's management APIs allows for faster time to market and AI agents, right? We saw centralized authentication for all MCP servers. It's unified across the platform, which is really, really important as well. Enhanced observability and governance for analytics and MCP tools for workflows and cost. MCP-Enabled Developer Portal, right? This turns the portal into MCP servers and it has an AI assistant, like Cursor. So, really cool for the developer portal. And AI integration for Composer and Runner. So, it allows for developer and mapping to the execute intelligent endpoints securely. So, there's a lot happening on that announcement, a lot happening, but one thing to call out is the SDK. When we look at Volcano SDK, it's open source, lightweight developer kit for building and testing that developer and deploying MCP-powered AI agents. Again, important focus on the market, important addressing the market needs and where it's going. It really does bridge the API infrastructure in the AI agent development and this is available on GitHub. So, if you look at Volcano.dev, you can get a lot of this information as well. And then, again, looking at our app dev research, we see that 68% of organizations, they really want to work with vendors that sponsor and support open-source projects, and that's what exactly what Kong is doing here, so they're providing it. So, key takeaway on this announcement, Kong is industrializing that agentic development with secure, governed MCP infrastructure. So, big, big announcement there. Second announcement that popped off the screen and came to life in the keynote was Kong is bringing machine identity and APIs and AI agents together. So, this is really about securing the non-human internet, right? Kong launches this Identity. I should say Kong Identity was discussed and announced, unifying the API identity management with Konnect. This solves that critical gap that we saw between securing and scalable machine-to-machine or M-to-M authentication and AI proliferation. We know that there's a lot of agents being created. We know that there's a lot around AI agents and A-to-A and M-to-M, so this is really a big factor. This also eliminates the dependency on external IDPs, basically allowing for native authentication for Konnect enforcement throughout the gateway. Key features here to think about and takeaway is per-region authentication servers for granular access control, dynamic claim templates for context-aware JWTs, and then developer self-service for dynamic climate registration. It's a strategic impact that allows for establishing zero-trust models across the agentic AI era. It also unifies the human and machine identities and control on one place. Again, reducing the complexity, reducing the friction, allowing for a safe, secure environment for connectivity, reducing the the backend load for simplicity and secure logic. So, this is really a big announcement, I think it's important to understand as well. I want to also talk about another announcement, which was KAi. KAi is the agentic API platform for Copilot for Konnect. This is really about the intelligent Copilot for API and agentic operations within Konnect. It allows for that Copilot integration and designs to help developers compose, develop, and really discover and optimize APIs and MCP integration using natural language. So, it makes it easier, again, allowing for that citizen developer, allowing for professional developers to be more productive. And this reinforces Kong's role in augmenting developer experience with AI assistants. So, big, big announcement there. I think it remains to be seen on the adoption, but it definitely is in tracking and in line with the industry and where it's going. We also saw another announcement that is part of their press releases and part of the keynote here, which Kong Konnect Service Catalog now supports AWS. And this is a unified visibility and governance across multi-gateway environments. This adds native AWS API gateway integration, so you can discover and govern APIs within AWS-deployed inside Konnect. So, big announcement there. It solves for API sprawl across hybrid and multi cloud infrastructures, so that's an important unification as well. We're seeing this in our research, we're seeing that there's no longer this line between whether you're in a public cloud, private cloud, the core, the edge. So, having this hybrid and multi cloud infrastructure support, incredibly important. And then, we're seeing that in our research as well. So, the benefits around this, we see that there's a unified source of truth for APIs, both for human and AI consumers. We see governance scorecards and for compliance and security validation. Again, a big, big factor here. When we look at things like the new EUCRA that's coming out or any of the compliance and regulation rules that are going in place, these are the areas that Kong is really pushing forward in and I'm really excited to see that from the Kong perspective. It provides rapid visibility and remediation and governance for non-compliant APIs, so you can identify and address it as needed. So, what's the outcome? When we look at this, the platform and security teams can now gain full control, while the developers and agents are really providing that frictionless success. That's really where it is coming down. Reduce complexity, allowing for the APIs to work together and drive towards success. A big announcement that came up was building on the recent acquisition of OpenMeter. This was something else that I think is something to call forward here. Kong introduces Konnect Metering and Billing. This is the ability to monetize APIs and AI models and data streams. It really provides that real-time metering and flexible pricing, but also, automated billing for digital assets. Big factor here, because when Kong discussed that partnership and acquisition strategy of OpenMeter, it really was about that unification visibility across APIs, AI workloads, and data streams. But the key features that really were important to call out here is, I should say, the user and the usage-based metering built into the Kong gateways, as a flexible rate card for add-on and entitlements as well as chargebacks, and real-time dashboard for that revenue and churn insight. So, a way to understand what's going on with the APIs, but also, understand how to isolate the costs, the chargebacks, and also, really to monetize what's going on with that space. This ties to, as I mentioned, the OpenMeter acquisition and it integrates an open standard across Konnect, so really cool thing here. But I would say the key takeaways here for this is that it turns the APIs and AI services into direct revenue engines for the agentic economy. Really cool stuff. I think that's really where this is going and where the money is being driven here, it remains to be seen, but definitely it is interesting on Kong's approach here. And then, finally, I want to talk about the Event Gateway, Kong Event Gateway. This is now becoming available and it extends the Konnect to event-driven data systems. It exposes and manages Kafka event streams as secure discoverable APIs. So, why is that important? Well, it allows for unification of APIs and event governance under one control plane. That's important, so you don't have to have all these different windows to look through and all these different areas to look through. It's all under one view. And it visualizes the Kafka clusters into topics for multi-team efficiency. So, you can have that collaboration effect and then enable self-service data access for AI agents and LLMs via the developer portal integration. Huge win here because it allows for simplicity and allows for productivity and growth. So, the outcomes here, it really defrags the event data ecosystem and powers the data modernization strategy, which again, is a big factor of how to understand that organizations are trying to figure out how to do this and work closely to it. So, I will say that within closing, we see that collectively these announcements are really reinforcing Kong's vision of Konnect as a control plane for agentic enterprises. So, the core themes, core takeaways, I would say, is security with machine identity governance and zero-trust, intelligence with AI agentic workflows and Copilot capabilities. Monetization, I couldn't emphasize that more, but AIs and APIs as data, as revenue assets and unifications using one platform for APIs, agents and events across multi-cloud environments. Lot's happening here. Kong is positioning itself to be the infrastructure backbone of the agentic economy, and I think it's really, really powerful. I'm really excited to see where it's coming. I am Paul Nashawaty and I'm coming to you live from the show floor at the Kong API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, the leading source for tech news.