Kong Inc., a startup helping enterprises build and manage cloud-native applications more easily, today announced that it has closed a $100 million funding round led by Tiger Global at a $1.4 billion valuation.

San Francisco-based Kong has tripled its valuation since its last funding round in early 2019.

Modern enterprise applications are built not as a single, monolithic code base but rather as a collection of microservices packaged into software containers. The microservices that make up an application need a way to communicate with each other, as well as with other parts of a company’s information technology environment. That’s the task Kong simplifies with its flagship Konnect software platform.

Konnect acts as a communications layer that companies can use to process the data flowing among their microservices-based applications. The platform handles the complex logistics of transporting data and provides management tools that allow IT teams to control the process. Administrators have access to monitoring dashboards for tracking how traffic flows between services, an automated suspicious activity detector and other features.

Konnect supports all the major public cloud platforms. It also works with on-premises computing environments running the Kubernetes container orchestration framework.

“Software is truly becoming like a giant nervous system through millions of APIs and services,” said Kong co-founder and Chief Executive Augusto Marietti. “Kong is on a mission to become the spinal cord and backbone by building the cloud connectivity fabric of the future.”

Kong’s pitch has caught the attention of enterprise chief information officers: The startup claims that its revenues have increased by more than 1,900% over the past three years, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers. Users of its software include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., General Electric Co. and the Nasdaq Stock Market, among others.

Kong has raised more than $360 million in funding to date. Besides Tiger Global, the latest $100 million funding round the startup announced today included the participation of Goldman Sachs Index Ventures, CRV, GGV Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The startup will use the funding to grow its engineering, customer experience and go-to-market teams.

Image: Kong