Silicon Valley-based Kong, a provider of open-source platforms and cloud services for APIs, has opened its second U.S. office in Atlanta. The team, largely sales and customer support, is based in WeWork Terminus and plans to hire about 10 by end of this year.
“Kong is built on smart, driven people — as we grow and expand, we continue to place a high priority on finding the best talent. Atlanta is a flourishing market for tech talent, and we saw an opportunity to bring this talent to Kong,” said co-founder and CEO Augusto Marietti in a statement.
“Through the new Atlanta office, we will now have bi-coastal presence in the U.S., enabling us to better support our customers and partners not only across the Americas but also across EMEA,” he said.
Kong was founded as ‘Mashape’ in Italy, but the two Italian co-founders moved operations to San Francisco after receiving initial funding from Silicon Valley-based angels including the founders of YouTube. They have raised $28 million in their lifetime with investors including big names like NEA, Index Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s (of Google) Innovation Endeavors, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
In 2017, the company changed its name to Kong to reflect a focus on its product of the same name, an API Gateway tool. The Gateway powers over 20,000 APIs.
As its first Atlanta hire, Kong has brought in Brigitte Boyles, a software sales veteran with experience at First Data and Pindrop Security. They’re hiring sales development roles now.
