Kong Inc., the cloud connectivity company, today announced that Juliette Rizkallah has joined the company as its first chief marketing officer (CMO). Juliette‘s appointment follows record growth for the company, fueled by its $100 million Series D funding round that tripled its valuation to $1.4 billion in February. A remote-first company, Kong now has more than 350 employees across 30 countries, with headcount accelerating rapidly across Asia Pacific Japan (238%) and Europe, Middle East and Africa (193%) regions.
Kong’s flagship software – Kong Gateway – now exceeds 273 million downloads across 14,000 organizations, making it the most widely used open-source API platform in the world with over 2.7 million active monthly instances. Kong has also seen record expansion among its more than 400 enterprise customers in 2021, with acceleration in net new customers across industries and geographical regions, such as Amerisure Insurance, Moderna, MUFG Bank, RELX Group and Wayfair. With a thriving partner ecosystem, Kong’s year-over-year growth is soaring, securing its inclusion on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ranking for two consecutive years and in the 2021 Forbes Cloud 100.
“I am thrilled to join Kong and continue to blaze its trail as a leader and visionary in API management and service connectivity,” said Juliette Rizkallah. “Kong provides a unique and truly innovative offering in a red-hot industry to help transform businesses trapped in outdated software environments. After meeting with Aghi, Marco and the team, and understanding their vision for the future of service connectivity, you could say it was professional love at first sight.”
Juliette brings more than 30 years of experience in marketing, sales development and growth strategy for leading enterprise technology companies. She most recently served as CMO for A Cloud Guru, a social learning platform for cloud computing acquired this year by Pluralsight. Prior to that, she was CMO at SailPoint for six years, where she developed and led the company’s worldwide marketing and was instrumental in the company’s successful 2017 IPO. She has also held senior marketing leadership roles at Check Point Software Technologies, BusinessObjects, CA and Oracle. Juliette is also on the board of Elemica, a digital supply chain company, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“Juliette is a tremendous addition to our leadership team and brings a unique background grounded in business, strategy and data-driven marketing to her role as Kong’s first CMO,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong. “Juliette has led and scaled some of the world’s largest technology companies and is a hands-on problem solver who will help take Kong to new heights. Her leadership will enable us to help even more developers as they encounter the ever-growing challenges of building and maintaining modern applications.”
Kong has a rich history of enabling developers to accelerate the time to market new digital applications by automating connectivity across applications and microservices, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. The company’s plug-and-play solutions are designed to make API and microservice connectivity accessible and consumable in the same way electricity is. For the second consecutive year, Kong was positioned by Gartner in the Leaders quadrant of the 2021 Gartner Full Lifecycle API Management Magic Quadrant, where it again ranked highest for its completeness of vision.
