KrakenD
KrakenD is a Barcelona-based vendor of a stateless, high-performance API gateway offering Open Source, Enterprise, and AI Gateway editions, serving enterprise customers across e-commerce, banking, government, and technology with subscription licensing and VAR distribution.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2021
- HeadquartersBarcelona, Spain
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What KrakenD does
KrakenD is a Barcelona-based software vendor that develops a stateless, distributed, high-performance API gateway built in Go on the Lura Project open-source framework hosted at The Linux Foundation. Its product portfolio comprises three tiers: a free KrakenD Open Source Edition, a paid KrakenD Enterprise Edition with 30+ additional features (FIPS-140, Security Policies, CEL, advanced observability, and SLA-backed 24/7 support), and a KrakenD AI Gateway add-on that routes LLM traffic across providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock with prompt guardrails, token budgets, and a built-in MCP server. The gateway aggregates, secures, transforms, and rate-limits traffic for REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Lambda, and other backends, and integrates with observability stacks including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Jaeger, and AWS X-Ray.
The company monetizes primarily through annual subscription licenses for the Enterprise Edition sold via direct enterprise field sales, supplemented by a Value-Added Reseller network, paid training and certification through training.krakend.io, and a free open-source funnel that feeds enterprise conversion. Its named customer base spans e-commerce (Hepsiburada, Showpo, Privalia-Veepee), technology (IBM, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Postman, Culture Amp), travel (lastminute.com), media (Universal, AMC Networks), insurance (i2S by GFI), retail (Coop Atlantique), and government (America's Navy). KrakenD holds SOC 2 Type II certification and is an official CVE Numbering Authority, supporting its positioning in regulated e-government and open banking verticals.
In 2025, KrakenD was acquired by Shop Circle, a London-based AI-driven B2B software group that extended its Series B to €84 million to fund acquisitions. The company continues to operate as an independent business unit under the KrakenD brand from its headquarters in Barcelona, with 1-10 employees and a globally distributed customer footprint.
KrakenD firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- KrakenD
- Legal name
- KRAKEND, S.L.U.
- Website
- https://krakend.io
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2021
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Short description
- KrakenD is a Barcelona-based vendor of a stateless, high-performance API gateway offering Open Source, Enterprise, and AI Gateway editions, serving enterprise customers across e-commerce, banking, government, and technology with subscription licensing and VAR distribution.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
KrakenD industry classification
Industry- Product category
- API Management Software
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (513210), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)
- akta.pro primary industry
- API Management & Gateways (BPAMAOAA)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- API Management Platforms (API Gateways, Developer Portals) (HDAEAIAA), API Gateway & Application Gateway (L7 Routing/Policy) (HDAFAHAH), API-Led Integration Middleware (Integration Gateways) (HDAEACAL)
Keywords
Where KrakenD is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Barcelona
- HQ country
- Spain
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices1 record
Markets served
KrakenD business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Infrastructure
Revenue model
- Enterprise Edition Subscription: Production-grade API Gateway with security, governance, and 24/7 support backed by SLAs. Subscription-based licensing with unlimited requests, APIs, and AI workloads. Transparent, predictable pricing with no hidden costs or extras.
- Community Edition (Open Source): Free-to-use open source API gateway, providing the core gateway functionality at no cost. Drives adoption and community growth while supporting the paid Enterprise tier.
- Professional Services: Support and maintenance services including success engineers, SLA-backed support, and training/certification programs through training.krakend.io platform.
- VAR Reseller Distribution: Value-Added Reseller network distributes and resells KrakenD software, with VARs entering into VAR Reseller Agreements for distribution in specified territories.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Others | Community Edition - Free open source API gateway |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise Edition - Production-grade with SLAs |
| Subscription | Annual | AI Gateway - LLM routing and AI workload management |
Go-to-market motion3 records
Distribution channels4 records
Marketing channels7 records
KrakenD product offering
Product offeringCore offering
KrakenD develops and sells a stateless, distributed, high-performance API Gateway built in Go and powered by the Lura Project (hosted at The Linux Foundation). The gateway acts as a reverse-proxy and API aggregator that connects, secures, aggregates, transforms, and removes data across microservices and AI workloads. The company offers three products: a free Open Source / Community Edition, a paid Enterprise Edition with SLAs and 24/7 support, and an AI Gateway add-on providing LLM routing, prompt guardrails, token budgets, and a built-in MCP server.
Product overview
KrakenD is a high-performance, stateless API Gateway offered in three tiers: Open Source (free community edition), Enterprise (paid with SLAs and 30+ additional features), and AI Gateway (specialized layer for LLM routing, AI security, and cost control). The products share a compatible, exchangeable configuration format, allowing seamless migration between editions. The open-source engine is powered by the Lura Project at The Linux Foundation. The Enterprise Edition adds advanced observability (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog), expanded service connectivity (gRPC, SOAP, WebSockets, GraphQL, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Lambda), enhanced security (FIPS-140, Security Policies, CEL), and professional support with SLAs. The AI Gateway extends the platform with unified LLM routing across multiple providers, prompt guardrails, token budgets, and MCP server capabilities.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- KrakenD Open Source Edition (Community Edition) Free, open-source high-performance API gateway providing core API gateway functionality including rate limiting, authentication, caching, and request aggregation. Trusted by thousands of teams globally and serves as the product-led growth entry point for the Enterprise Edition.
- KrakenD Enterprise Edition Production-grade API gateway with enterprise features, SLAs, security, governance, and 24/7 support. Adds 30+ features beyond the Community Edition including FIPS-140, Security Policies with CEL, advanced OpenTelemetry observability, and enhanced service connectivity to gRPC, SOAP, WebSockets, GraphQL, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Lambda. Sold on annual subscription with unlimited requests, APIs, and AI workloads.
- KrakenD AI Gateway Specialized gateway layer for AI workloads featuring LLM routing with fallback, retries, and load balancing across OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock; prompt guardrails and prompt injection detection; token and cost budgets per user, team, or endpoint; and a built-in MCP server for exposing APIs as tools for AI agents with authentication, quotas, and security controls.
Quantifiable outcome
- Backend load reduced by approximately 40% via gateway-level caching (Showpo case study)
- +4 more outcomes
Companies that use KrakenD
Customer profileNamed customers14 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles5 records
KrakenD technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration27 records
AI capability4 records
Feature11 records
KrakenD partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Three partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.
- OSC KoreacoreOSC Korea is an official KrakenD integration partner in South Korea, specializing in open-source, cloud, and AI-native technologies. The partnership delivers cutting-edge API and AI solutions to the Korean market with localized expertise. OSC Korea combines global solutions with tailored technical support, focusing on Open Source, Security, and Content pillars for cloud-native and AI-native transformations. The collaboration focuses on pioneering new use cases powered by KrakenD AI Gateway.
- Linux Foundation / Lura ProjectcoreThe Lura Project is the open-source framework underlying KrakenD, hosted at The Linux Foundation with community contribution. KrakenD Enterprise and Community editions are built on this framework.
- Convert DigitalminorConvert Digital is the implementation partner that helped Showpo replatform from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus with KrakenD as the BFF. They delivered the headless migration project.
Scale indicators4 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
KrakenD competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Gravitee: Gravitee is an open-source API management platform (API Gateway + API Management + Dashboard) competing directly with KrakenD's enterprise tier. Both emphasize event-native API management and target financial services and enterprise customers with governance requirements.
- WSO2: WSO2 offers an open-source API management platform (WSO2 API Manager) and integration platform, directly competing with KrakenD on enterprise API gateway features. Both target financial services, government, and telecom customers with strong open-source credentials.
- Tyk Technologies: Tyk offers an open-source API gateway (Tyk Gateway) with an enterprise edition, competing head-to-head with KrakenD on price-sensitive self-hosted deployments. Both target developer-led adoption with freemium models and emphasize cloud-native, Kubernetes-friendly architectures.
- Kong Inc. Kong is the most direct competitor — an open-core API gateway (Kong Gateway) offering similar L7 routing, authentication, and traffic management with a paid enterprise tier. Both compete for the same microservices and Kubernetes workloads, and Kong's broader service mesh and AI Gateway extensions target the same KrakenD AI Gateway use cases.
Emerging players
- Solo.io: Solo.io provides Gloo Gateway and service mesh tooling (Istio, Envoy-based) targeting cloud-native API and AI gateway workloads. Like KrakenD, Solo.io emphasizes AI workload support and enterprise-grade gateways, but with a stronger service mesh focus.
- Traefik (Traefik Labs): Traefik is an open-source cloud-native application proxy and API gateway (built on Envoy), widely deployed in Kubernetes environments. Like KrakenD, it emphasizes Kubernetes-native deployment and performance, but has a stronger ingress controller focus and a broader open-source community.
Broad incumbents
- Amazon API Gateway: AWS API Gateway is the hyperscaler-native gateway bundled into the AWS ecosystem at low marginal cost. For AWS-standardized workloads, it competes with KrakenD on price and integration, though KrakenD differentiates on cross-cloud portability and performance benchmarks.
- MuleSoft (Salesforce): MuleSoft is a broad enterprise integration and API management platform owned by Salesforce, targeting large enterprises with full iPaaS capabilities. It competes with KrakenD for enterprise API gateway deals, especially in Salesforce-centric accounts, but at a much higher price point and with significantly more functionality.
- Azure API Management: Azure API Management (APIM) is Microsoft's managed API gateway service within the Azure cloud platform. It competes with KrakenD for Microsoft-centric enterprises and government workloads, offering tight Azure AD integration but limited cloud portability compared to KrakenD's vendor-neutral approach.
- Apigee (Google Cloud): Apigee is Google's enterprise API management platform, offering a full API gateway, developer portal, and analytics suite. It competes with KrakenD's enterprise tier for large enterprises, particularly those already on Google Cloud, but is part of a much broader Google Cloud portfolio.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
KrakenD social profiles
Digital presenceKrakenD compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance2 records
KrakenD financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
KrakenD leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles2 records
KrakenD funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
KrakenD M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about KrakenD
What does KrakenD do?
KrakenD develops and sells a stateless, distributed, high-performance API Gateway built in Go and powered by the Lura Project (hosted at The Linux Foundation). The gateway acts as a reverse-proxy and API aggregator that connects, secures, aggregates, transforms, and removes data across microservices and AI workloads. The company offers three products: a free Open Source / Community Edition, a paid Enterprise Edition with SLAs and 24/7 support, and an AI Gateway add-on providing LLM routing, prompt guardrails, token budgets, and a built-in MCP server.
Is KrakenD a public or private company?
KrakenD is a private company. It is classified as corporate owned and is currently operating.
When was KrakenD founded?
KrakenD was founded in 2021. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is KrakenD based?
KrakenD is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, in the Europe region.
How does KrakenD make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Enterprise Edition Subscription is the primary driver. The others are community Edition (Open Source), professional Services and VAR Reseller Distribution.
Who are KrakenD's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Gravitee, WSO2, Tyk Technologies and Kong Inc.. Emerging players are Solo.io and Traefik (Traefik Labs). Broad incumbents are Amazon API Gateway, MuleSoft (Salesforce), Azure API Management and Apigee (Google Cloud).
Does KrakenD have an API?
Yes. KrakenD offers an API for managing and monitoring the gateway, including a Metrics API for exposing endpoint-level telemetry, OpenTelemetry endpoints for traces, and programmatic access to configuration management. The gateway supports OpenAPI import/export for API documentation generation and Postman collection generation. Plugins can be written to extend HTTP server and client functionality. No public REST API for external automation of gateway management is explicitly documented.
What industry is KrakenD in?
KrakenD's product category is API Management Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is BPAMAOAA, API Management & Gateways, with a secondary code of HDAEAIAA, API Management Platforms (API Gateways, Developer Portals). Its NAICS code is 513210 and its SIC code is 7372.