Announcing the 2026 Kong Innovator Awards

Kong recognizes customers driving innovation and business impact, with winners unveiled at API + AI Summit 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, announced the winners of the Kong Innovator Awards at API + AI Summit 2026 in Los Angeles. The awards recognize the customers using Kong to solve complex challenges, accelerate innovation and set a new bar for what's possible with APIs and AI connectivity.

"Every year, our customers show us what's possible when technology is built to solve real business challenges, and this year's Innovator Award winners are no exception. From modernizing critical infrastructure and transforming developer experiences to governing AI and creating new business models, these organizations are using Kong to turn complex connectivity challenges into measurable impact. We're proud to recognize their innovation and share their stories with the broader community at API + AI Summit 2026. Congrats all," said Reza Shafii, Senior Vice President, Product, Kong Inc.

The 2026 Innovator Award recipients include:

• Top Kong Innovator - Americas: Nordstrom wanted to standardize and secure service-to-service communication across its Kubernetes environment while enabling a scalable path to multi-region workloads. With Kong, they deployed Kong Mesh across their Kubernetes fleet through a multi-region architecture with a global control plane in Konnect and zone control planes for each cluster, without requiring changes to calling services. Tier-1 multi-region workloads now run with mTLS and workload identity in production, while applications maintain the same endpoints and behavior. The approach also eliminated the nginx TLS sidecar and static per-cluster CA; reduced pods from three containers to two and maintained roughly 1ms additional latency at p50 while processing 6,000 requests per second.
• Top Kong Innovator - Europe and Middle East: Ericsson – This award recognizes Ericsson for building the platform foundations of an AI-ready enterprise. Ericsson saw early that APIs, AI models and intelligent agents would converge, and built for that shift before it arrived. Two capabilities stand out: Federated API Management at enterprise scale, and the establishment of an AI Gateway in 2024 well ahead of most enterprises as the governed entry point for AI across Ericsson. Built with Kong, these platforms now carry a large share of Ericsson's enterprise API traffic and provide the security, governance and cost control that allow AI and agentic capabilities to scale responsibly across the company. This proactive, platform-led approach has also positioned Ericsson for the next phase of the AI evolution in the company: an AI Mesh in which APIs, AI, agents and context operate in a secure and governed operating model. The award recognizes the three phases: early adoption, reusable and scalable platforms, to enterprise AI enablement that turn new technology into enterprise AI capability and help Ericsson build for the future.
• Top Kong Innovator - Asia-Pacific: The Hong Kong Jockey Club was tackling three transformations at once: modernizing fragmented customer identity systems, migrating enterprise APIs off a legacy gateway, and standing up new infrastructure to support Mainland China expansion. With Kong, they were able to migrate their enterprise API estate from WSO2 with minimal disruption; unify customer identity into a centralized CIAM model for consistent authentication across every digital channel; deploy a dedicated Kong platform in Mainland China to support the SP30 program with consistent governance across regions and introduce a self-service API platform that let development teams onboard and manage APIs independently while maintaining sub-20ms response times at the 99th percentile.
• Top Kong Innovator - Enterprise Transformation: Latitude Financial Services is migrating its credit cards core application to a cloud native platform as part of a major technology modernisation. They needed both the new and existing technology to run side by side while products migrated, and with Kong Konnect, they built custom, product-aware routing that dynamically determined which platform a request would go to, eliminating the need for migration logic in every application. As a result, they centralized rate limiting and downstream protection across the entire card-processing ecosystem; maintained sub-10ms latency while processing roughly 4 million requests a day and achieved zero request loss and zero production errors since go-live.
• Top Kong Innovator - Business Impact: Tel Aviv Stock Exchange needed the ability to productize, govern and monetize their valuable market data. With Kong, they transformed exchange data into governed, monetizable commercial products with a complete customer journey from discovery to consumption; kept all sensitive data on premises through Kong's hybrid architecture to meet regulatory requirements; established a consistent governance and security model across customer-facing services, internal APIs, and SaaS integrations and built the foundation to support both current customers and future AI-driven consumers.
• Top Kong Innovator - Developer Experience: TBC Bank's centralized API integration model had become a bottleneck as the organization scaled. To fix this, they used Kong to build a federated API ecosystem that lets approximately 150 teams own, publish and manage around 300 APIs independently; improved integration time by 80%; introduced a centralized Developer Portal so APIs are discoverable and ownership is clear and scaled the platform to support more than 8 billion API requests per month.

To receive updates about API + AI Summit 2027 and future Kong Innovator Awards, please visit https://konghq.com/events/conferences/api-summit.

About Kong Inc.

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.

SOURCE Kong Inc.