Marco Palladino

Marco Palladino is the cofounder of Kong and Mashape. He also serves as Kong's CTO. Palladino is a member of the business governance board at The Open API Initiative (OAI) of the Linux Foundation.

Palladino is a cofounder of the now-defunct MemboxX, a web service that allowed users to store and share various documents and photos and also offered password and personal identification number (PIN) management. MemboxX was founded in March 2007 and shut down in April 2009.

Mashape was founded by Palladino, Augusto Marietti, and Michele Zonca. Over its lifetime, it became the largest application programming interface (API) marketplace in the world. The cofounders began looking for funding for Mashape in Italy in 2007 but were unsuccessful. Despite this, they began pursuing the venture in April 2009. The team moved into a garage in Milan, using it as a workspace to practice coding. In September 2009, they traveled to San Francisco, California, to participate in TechCrunch50, where they demoed a simple prototype of their product. After this, the cofounders moved to San Francisco permanently in January 2010. They were able to find investors within three weeks, receiving $101,000 from Kevin Donahue and Dwipal Desai. Mashape launched in private alpha mode in November 2010. As an API marketplace, Mashape has been described as “Etsy for cloud services” and "Amazon for APIs." Mashape launched publicly on July 30, 2012.

In 2015, Mashape pivoted its purpose after realizing its business model was flawed and it wasn't making any money. The company decided to make its technology open source and accessible to the public via GitHub. This change served as the foundation for Palladino's next company, Kong. Mashape was acquired by RapidAPI in May 2017.

Kong was founded on April 28, 2015, when Mashape made its microservices management layer open source and free to access. It was originally produced internally as part of Mashape's API hub development and continuous management platform. Kong provides services for microservice engineers for everyday development purposes. These services include an interface for enrolling APIs in a registry and a platform for plugins that provide a base of common functions that microservices borrow from, like for authentication purposes.