Kong acquires Insomnia, launches Kong Studio for API development

API and microservices platform Kong today announced that it has acquired Insomnia, a popular open-source tool for debugging APIs. The company, which also recently announced that it had raised a $43 million Series C round, has already put this acquisition to work by using it to build Kong Studio, a tool for designing, building and maintaining APIs for both REST and GraphQL endpoints.

As Kong CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti told me, the company wants to expand its platform to cover the full service life cycle. So far, it has mostly focused on the runtime, but now it wants to enable developers to also design and test their services. "We looked at the space and Insomnia is the number one open source API testing platform," he told me. "And we thought that by having Insomnia in our portfolio, we will get the pre-production part of things and on top of that, we'll be able to build Kong Studio, which is kind of the other side of Insomnia that allows you to design APIs."

Insomnia launched in 2015, as a side project of its sole developer, Greg Schier. Schier quit his job in 2016 to focus on Insomnia full-time and then open-sourced it in 2017. Today, the project has 100 contributors and the tool is used by "hundreds of thousands of developers," according to Schier.

Marietti says both the open-source project and the paid Insomnia Plus service will continue to operate as before.

In addition to Kong Studio and the Insomnia acquisition, the company also today launched the latest version of its Enterprise service, the aptly named Kong Enterprise 2020. New features here include support for REST, Kafka Streams and GraphQL. Kong also launched Kong Gateway 2.0 with additional GraphQL support and the ability to write plugins in Go.