Kong acquires OpenMeter 

Cloud API company Kong has acquired of OpenMeter, an open source and SaaS platform for usage-based metering and billing.

The acquisition is hoped to bring “usage-based monetisation capabilities” to Kong Konnect, the company’s API platform.

Kong wants users to be able to productise and bill for their APIs, AI and data streams.

In the AI era, billing becomes a metering problem.

Agents will exchange “labour” via APIs. Large Language Models – if not chats – are already sold via APIs. This requires a new kind of platform that brings together API infrastructure and monetisation all in one.

According to Kong, a unified approach to enforcement, security and monetisation is useful as AI adoption accelerates, because digital connections are no longer deterministic or limited to the pace of human activity. 

Instead, they are continuous, machine-driven and orders of magnitude larger. AI agents can trigger thousands of API and data calls per second, increasing both the scale and variability of usage. To capture that value without undercharging or overcharging, organisations need scalable metering and billing built for precision and AI speed.

“As businesses scale and AI adoption grows, organisations need simple, turnkey solutions to meter and monetise digital consumption in real time. With OpenMeter joining Kong, we’re enabling customers to turn their APIs, data and AI capabilities into new revenue streams. Thus making monetisation native, scalable and ready for the agentic AI era,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc.

With this acquisition, OpenMeter’s core product will be integrated into Kong Konnect, giving organisations a way to measure, bill and manage usage across all digital assets, including APIs, LLMs and event streams consumed by AI agents. 

Konnect also brings unique metadata from the API runtimes to enable seamless enforcement and metering. By combining usage data, billing infrastructure and cloud cost observability, product managers and developers will gain turnkey tools for consumption-based pricing, faster product launches and flexible monetisation strategies that can provide higher ROI from digital services.