theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Zero Trust Cyber Series | Marco Palladino, Kong

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Marco Palladino

Co-Founder & CTO

Kong

play_circle_outline Agentic AI, AI agents making decisions for organizations, increasing efficiency

play_circle_outline Transforming Success: Infrastructure, Governance, and AI Lifecycle in GenAI and Cloud-Native Applications with API Connectivity

play_circle_outline Kong's success, $175 million funding round, expanding in new markets

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Marco Palladino, Kong

Marco Palladino

Co-Founder & CTO Kong

TheCUBE is in New York City for Media Week, conducting interviews with cyber leaders from Tel Aviv and AI leaders. President Trump's visit to the NYSE caused some schedule changes. Generative AI is driving major productivity with cloud-native applications and APIs. Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong, discusses the evolving API market with the rise of GenAI models. AI agents are now making decisions for organizations, increasing efficiency. As AI adoption grows, organizations need to establish AI governance to leverage benefits in a secure way. Kong recently raised ... Read more

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Marco Palladino, Kong

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>> Hello and welcome to theCUBE here in New York City. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Dave Vellante was here earlier in the week. We're here for Media Week, kicking off a great set of interviews with cyber leaders from Tel Aviv. A lot of startups from Tel Aviv coming in, and also AI leaders for the rest of the week. And of course, President Trump had a big visit here at the NYSE today. Kind of kicked back our schedule. But nonetheless, great excitement here as everyone's jazzed up about the economy. They're jazzed up about getting back to work. And of course we're seeing a major productivity boom with generative AI. And a lot of that has to do with the cloud and the cloud-native applications as they transform into generative AI native either retrofitted and or net new. And of course, all these apps are connected with APIs and Marco Palladino is here, the CTO of Kong, who we've been following on SiliconANGLE. Going back to 2009, Marco, you guys, when you were just forming, wrote a post guest post on SiliconANGLE when we were starting. Now you're worth over $2 billion and we're theCUBE still doing our thing. Great to see you. How does it feel?

Marco Palladino

>> Well, thanks for having me here. It feels great. It feels great.

>> You guys have always been on the API, which we love. We've been tracking that. But now that cloud has legitimized APIs as an operating framework we've discussed many times on theCUBE, GenAI is a big part of it. Because you have APIs that connect. Now you have services data flowing through the APIs that are going to have to be managed, stay tied to applications. It's a connected ecosystem now in the cloud, not just SaaS apps connecting on the cloud. No longer do people want that black box behind the API. There's a lot more going on with the API, API intelligence. This is one of the top conversations in the infrastructure cloud native world that we have at KubeCon, at re:Invent. What's the current state of the API market from your standpoint?

Marco Palladino

>> Well, look, the API market is really expanding with these new GenAI models that developers are using to harness intelligence out of the data and the services that they make available for an API. And turns out the GenAI itself, it's also powered by APIs. And so the more AI and the more API that is going to be in our systems. We're looking at the evolution of AI use cases right now. Everybody started by building the chatbots, then organizations were starting to adopt co-pilots to improve developer efficiency. But now what we're seeing is the third generation of AI applications in the world, and that is more and more agentic workflows. These are AI agents that not only are going to be giving us information and data, but they are going to be performing decisions for us. And the agentic ones are the ones that I'm very, very excited about because these are the ones that can increase the overall efficiency of the entire organization. So not just a helper anymore for accessing data, for asking questions, but something that lives and breathes, so to speak, and can make decisions for the organization.

>> Yeah, lives and breathes, love that. Because AI, especially AGI is coming, you want the conversations, where you left off on the last conversation. These are the top conversations. As CTO of Kong, you see all the plumbing, you know what's going on in the APIs. What is it about the agentic layer that's coming, the agentic systems that will power the agents that you think is important and that you're excited about that people should be paying attention to?

Marco Palladino

>> Well, so at Kong, we're working with organizations that are consuming, but they had no clue about what was the consumption that was being generated by the teams. And so as they get more mature, we are providing them with infrastructure for AI so they can secure it, they can observe it, they can establish guardrails. They have control on that GenAI traffic. Now with agentic AI, well this infrastructure becomes even more important because the agents are going to be making decisions for the customers, for the users. They're going to be making decisions for the internal processes of the organization. We need to have an observability layer and an infrastructure layer that even more so, allows us to understand why AI made certain decisions, what was the inputs, what was the outputs, how do we control that behavior overall. And of course, organizations don't want to do that by chasing down the application teams. They want to enable the application teams to go and build as much innovation as possible while giving them infrastructure that allows to set up all of these contexts without having to build it from scratch every time.

>> Yeah. I interviewed Lori Beer who's the CIO at JP Morgan Chase at re:Invent. She was also on the stage. They have a $17 billion annual IT budget. I mean, that's not too shabby. It's pretty good. You want to some of that, don't you?

Marco Palladino

>> It's a pretty sizable budget, I'd say.

>> So when she came on theCUBE, she said something to me that made me connect the dots that we've been hearing on theCUBE, and that is that GenAI is just another application, from her standpoint. AppSec review, resilient frameworks. So it is an application. I mean, GenAI is an application feature, so APIs are empowering applications on the SaaS side. What's different? What do you see that's going to be the different thing that's going to make the agentic... Because She's like, "Look, we're using machine learning, but the agentic is not yet even close to coming yet." They have automation. That's not generative task automation. That's not generative search because they have do $10 trillion in a day. And so of course, it cannot fail. So they're more conservative. Yes. But what is that next step that's going to make that app be ready for prime time? What do you see? What are some of those technical things that clients have to get right, the customers to make sure that that app is AppSec reviewed, whatever term you use, whether it's resilient frameworks or security checks or just health of the application?

Marco Palladino

>> Well, so you ask me what is different, and I'm going to be responding to your question by first telling you what's more similar to what we have seen in the past. APIs over the years, they became products themselves. We were able to version APIs, decommission all their APIs. There are products like any other product we are building. Mobile applications, websites, APIs. Well, it turns out that the intelligence that we're building in our organization, it is also a product. So right now we're in the early days of AI adoption. So nobody's really thinking about implementing a life cycle around AI. But of course, as we get more mature, AI and agents will become products like any other product that we're building. So they're not a technical gimmick anymore, but real products that need a life cycle to be managed. That is what is similar between AI and APIs. What is different is the pace of innovation. Look, I am meeting with executives that are trying to support GenAI adoption in their organizations. And each one of them is telling me, "Wow, we thought that this industry was moving fast, and then now with this all AI. It's like we're entering a new game." The pace of innovation is just accelerated. And so we need to provide the right infrastructure and the right support in the organization for enabling these new models, the most advanced ones that are being shipped every month to be leveraged, to be adopted in a secure way, in a governed way. And we need to do that by establishing AI governance across the teams and across all the applications that we're building. So without AI governance, the organization is not going to be able to harness the benefits of AI in a productive way. And so it is really important that we anticipate these explosion of AI use cases in a much quicker way, in a much faster way than we did in the past for APIs. But at the end, we have to establish a life cycle for those agents as well.

>> And that basically supports the narrative we've been seeing on theCUBE. The infrastructure foundation has to be set, otherwise it'll be chaos or mismanagement or bad agents, bad data. So you don't get that right. What you're saying is that get that right foundationally.

Marco Palladino

>> Especially for highly regulated industries, financial services, banking, telecommunications, healthcare, pharmaceutical organizations, they have to do that. Otherwise, it's the wild west. And so we are seeing executives understanding that, and we're seeing executives wanting to enable their teams to be more productive by taking care of all of these cross-cutting requirements that they all need. The guard railing, the governance, the observability, the infrastructure readiness, the quality. The quality of AI, how do we improve that over time? Making sure that all of that is being taken care of for the developers so the developers can focus in innovating and moving as fast as they want while the organization has created an envelope for those developers to be successful but also be regulated, so to speak.

>> Well, you guys have done such great work. Again, following the Kong journey. Again. APIs, everyone who's in cloud knew APIs were going to be a standard. You guys productized it. And I love that analogy of productization of APIs as a tell sign of what's to come with GenAI because it makes total sense. It's like the agent's out of date, get the new one in and data might drive that. So great point, Marco. Love that thing. You were just saying before we came on, "More AI, better... APIs is-"

Marco Palladino

>> The more AI, the more APIs.

>> The more AI, more APIs.

Marco Palladino

>> Yes. Because AI happens to be the latest digital use case for APIs. What we're seeing here is the APIs effectively being the internet as we know it today. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we used to go on websites, listen to, read blog posts and all of that. That internet disappeared. It's now all API powered, every mobile interaction, every website interaction, every IoT device that, everything is API powered. And turns out that GenAI is also API powered because every time we consume GenAI, that is an API call that we're making.

>> Got it. Well, we're here at the NYSC. You see behind us is pretty mellow now, but earlier, President-elect Donald Trump was on. Not bad, not too shabby here in the studio, the new CUBE studio.

Marco Palladino

>> It's always great to be here.

>> Okay, so let's get into the momentum. Can you share just some of the successes you've had this year, some milestones, notable highlights, and recently a new round of fresh funding, which is a great testament to your momentum? Give some of the highlights of success for the company.

Marco Palladino

>> Yeah, we just announced a new funding round. We raised $175 million from existing investors and new investors. And the valuation of the company is now north of $2 billion. Look, we raised money because we are experiencing a phenomenal growth worldwide across our customer base. We're now powering API and AI infrastructure for over 700 enterprise organizations in the world. And we're expanding in new markets. So we're going to be leveraging the new resources that we have to keep growing in those new markets, markets like India, markets like Japan. Kong is powering a significant amount of traffic for the Indian digital public infrastructure that is serving digital services for billions of people. And so we're seeing lots of adoption across the world and we want to make sure that we can support our customers in those regions. But of course, innovation is going to be always a big part of our strategy. So this is also what allows us to capture new use cases and then build products that our customers can leverage out of the box to accelerate their own business.

>> So critical infrastructure as APIs now, their APIs are critical infrastructure. I agree with you a hundred percent. And not just enterprises, but the world. Dollars going towards technology investments continue to innovate because you got to harden, keep pace, and then go to market business expansion.

Marco Palladino

>> That's exactly right. Look, at the end of the day, we are technologists at heart, so most of our investments are still going to R&D. We are committed and we are obsessed with giving the best technology that our customers can get to power all these new modern API and AI digital use cases. And we do have an outsize R&D team for the size of our company that truly they're spending their whole day obsessing about building the best technology for these use cases. That means the best performance, that means the best features, that means the best capabilities on the platform.

>> Yeah, it's got to work. Just put a plug in for what you're looking for, hiring. Obviously you got the funding, so congratulations. What are you looking for for hires? Give a plug for what you're looking for.

Marco Palladino

>> Well, we're looking for everything. We're looking for developers, we're looking for architects. We're looking for managers and leaders that are helping us grow. We're looking for go-to-market function. We're looking for customer success roles. We're looking for sales of course. We're expanding all over the world, in Europe, in North America. North America is our domestic market, but Kong, as you know, is a global company. And so we're really hiring everywhere.

>> Yeah, I think they've got a good virtual work environment. You got varied presence. Real quick, before we end, what's the culture like? People might want to say, "Hey, what's the culture at Kong?" How would you describe as the co-founder, the culture of Kong, where people might be interested in joining you guys?

Marco Palladino

>> We are builders. We are builders at heart, so we are hiring people who want to make something to build something that's going to create an impact in the world. And we want to hire those people because those people are the ones that with their creativity and their innovation, are able to move our product line forward and make our customers happier.

>> Great. Marco, great to have you on theCUBE.

Marco Palladino

>> Thanks for having me.

>> This is our East Coast access point. I call it a supernode. We've got Palo Alto and Wall Street connecting Silicon Valley with all the financial markets here and money and power, and of course the tech scene. This is theCUBE bringing the action here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.