#United States #Los Angeles #Kong Inc. #AI Connectivity #Innovator Awards

Announcing the 2026 Kong Innovator Awards

On October 7, 2026, during the highly anticipated API + AI Summit held in Los Angeles, Kong Inc., a leading name in AI-based connectivity, revealed the winners of the Kong Innovator Awards.

These awards honor customers who have effectively harnessed Kong's platform to tackle complex challenges, foster innovation, and redefine the possibilities within API and AI connectivity. Reza Shafii, Senior Vice President of Product at Kong Inc., expressed pride in the winners, highlighting their accomplishments in modernizing infrastructures, transforming developer experiences, and pioneering novel business models. Each winner utilized Kong to convert intricate connectivity hurdles into quantifiable outcomes.

Award Winners

The recipients of the 2026 Kong Innovator Awards are:

1. Top Kong Innovator - Americas: Nordstrom

Nordstrom aimed to unify and secure service-to-service communication across its Kubernetes environment while facilitating scalability for multi-region workloads. Through Kong Mesh, they successfully deployed a multi-region architecture with a global control plane in Konnect, improving their infrastructure without necessitating changes to existing services. As a result, they managed to run tier-1 multi-region workloads with mTLS and workload identity in production, achieving remarkable stability and performance with minimal latency even as they processed immense volumes of requests.

2. Top Kong Innovator - Europe and Middle East: Ericsson

Ericsson is awarded for laying the groundwork for an AI-ready enterprise. They foresaw the integration of APIs, AI models, and intelligent agents, preparing for this convergence by implementing Federated API Management and establishing an AI Gateway proactively. These systems, built with Kong, now handle a significant portion of Ericsson’s API traffic while ensuring robust security and governance, paving the way for their next AI evolution, an AI Mesh that harmonizes APIs with AI.

3. Top Kong Innovator - Asia-Pacific: The Hong Kong Jockey Club

Facing multiple transformations, The Hong Kong Jockey Club modernized old customer identity systems, migrated enterprise APIs, and established new infrastructure for expansion into Mainland China. With Kong, they elegantly navigated these changes, seamlessly migrating from WSO2 while creating a centralized Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) model. They also deployed a Kong platform in Mainland China, ensuring consistent governance across regions and maintaining efficient response times in all operations.

4. Top Kong Innovator - Enterprise Transformation: Latitude Financial Services

Latitude Financial Services is transitioning its credit card core application to a cloud-native platform, which required synchronization of both new and legacy technologies. Leveraging Kong Konnect, they developed a routing system that intelligently directed requests between the platforms, significantly optimizing their card-processing environment and achieving impressive performance metrics without request loss or errors.

5. Top Kong Innovator - Business Impact: Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange utilized Kong to convert their valuable market data into marketable products. They established a comprehensive governance and security model across their services, providing a framework that meets regulatory requirements while preparing for future AI-driven consumer needs.

6. Top Kong Innovator - Developer Experience: TBC Bank

As TBC Bank scaled, their centralized API model became a bottleneck. By employing Kong, they created a federated API ecosystem that empowered around 150 teams to manage approximately 300 APIs autonomously, leading to a significant reduction in integration time and enhancing overall API discoverability and ownership through a centralized Developer Portal.

Conclusion

The Kong Innovator Awards spotlight incredible advancements achieved through strategic deployment of API and AI technologies. Each winner's story exemplifies how resilience, innovation, and strategic foresight can lead to impactful solutions in today's digital landscape. To stay updated about future awards and the upcoming API + AI Summit in 2027, please visit Kong’s official website.

For further insights on Kong Inc. and their transformative platform, explore www.konghq.com.