More than ever, it’s vital for organizations to develop software fast. Businesses are ever seeking ways to speed up their development, launch products sooner, and beat the competition. This is where AI proxies come into play. They're a new technology that helps developers solve tough software development challenges.

No AI without APIs — as we say here at Kong. I’m excited to officially share our oversubscribed Kong Series E financing at a $2 billion valuation! We raised $175 million in both primary and secondary, led again by Tiger Global and co-led by new investor Balderton as well as new strong participation from long-only Teachers’ Venture Growth (the late-stage growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan).

We announced the Kong Premium Technology Partner Program at API Summit 2024, and Confluent was one of the first in the program. This initial development was all about ensuring that the relationship between Kong and Confluent — from a business and product perspective — fully represented our joint belief that the world of data streaming and the world of APIs are converging.

In Kong Gateway 2.0, we released Hybrid Mode, also known as Control Plane/Data Plane separation. With it, our customers could efficiently and securely deploy clusters of Kong Gateway Dataplanes on their on-prem, private, and public clouds in any combination they wanted, and they could control the entire cluster from a single point, the Control Plane. Hybrid Mode became instantly popular with all our customers with large and varied deployments, due to the increased flexibility and ease of management.

It’s here! The Kong Gateway Operator release we teased at API Summit is now available for you all to use. KGO 1.4 allows you to configure Kong Konnect using CRDs, attach your DataPlane resources to Konnect with minimal configuration, and even manage the deployment of custom plugins using Kubernetes CRDs. Keep reading to find out more.

At API Summit 2024, a common theme covered was how there's no AI without APIs. This couldn’t be more true for Writer, the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises — and a notable user of the Kong Konnect unified API platform. Writer recently launched AI Studio, billed as “the fastest way to build generative AI apps.” AI Studio uses Writer API, Writer Framework, and Writer No Code to give people enterprise-grade generative AIs they can put in their own apps and services.