What the founders of KrakenD were doing long before any acquisition conversations began is something many infrastructure companies never manage to achieve: solving a hard, unglamorous problem so well that the market comes to you.

The challenge

By 2016, Albert Lombarte, Daniel López, and Daniel Ortiz had already spent years operating at a serious scale. At Zinio and Softonic, they were responsible for infrastructure handling millions of daily requests, and they kept colliding with the same limitation over and over again.

API Gateways simply were not built to scale.

They were monolithic by design, slow under pressure, and forced teams into uncomfortable trade-offs between performance and functionality. “Nobody was solving the API Gateway problem using proper engineering practices,” Lombarte recalls. “There was no stateless approach that truly prioritized scalability.”

So they did what engineers often do when a problem refuses to go away. They built their own solution. And then they rebuilt it. Several times.

What started as a technical frustration quickly turned into a larger challenge. Could an open-source project, built in Barcelona, with no external funding and no sales team, realistically compete with established enterprise infrastructure vendors?

The solution

KrakenD began as an open-source project with a radically different philosophy. Instead of behaving like a traditional proxy, it was designed as an API aggregator, combining multiple backend responses into a single optimized call. Its architecture was stateless, declarative, and horizontally scalable by default.

While much of the startup world chased growth at all costs, KrakenD took a contrarian path. The founders chose self-funding, organic adoption, and extreme operational efficiency. In 2021, when Albert García joined the project as co-founder, the company was formally incorporated. The team consisted of just five people, all deeply technical, quietly doubling revenue year after year while remaining profitable.

“Our counterparts during sales processes are usually engineers,” Lombarte explains. “We speak their language. Direct, precise, no fluff. That surprised a lot of customers, in a good way.”

That engineering-first mindset extended beyond the product itself. In May 2021, KrakenD donated its core framework to the Linux Foundation, becoming the only enterprise API Gateway operating under an open governance model. The move reinforced trust and credibility, attracting customers such as Honda, AMC Networks, Universal Orlando, American Express, LG Electronics, the U.S. Navy, and National Geographic.

The sale

After years of profitable growth, with customers in more than 30 countries and deployments across government, finance, telecom, and healthcare, the team began thinking seriously about the future.

They were not new to acquisitions. Lombarte and García had previously co-founded Splitweet, sold to Hootsuite in 2012, while García had also co-founded Uvinum, Europe’s leading wine marketplace, which was acquired by Pernod Ricard in 2018. They had experienced what it meant to be absorbed into a large corporate structure.

This time, they wanted something different.

“We were not selling to disappear into a larger organization,” Lombarte says. “We wanted a partner who could help us accelerate without losing our identity.”

When discussions with Shop Circle began, the alignment was immediate. The model resonated. Founders staying in management. Operational independence preserved. A long-term view on infrastructure software, paired with a clear understanding of where AI was headed.

The decision was not about handing over control, but about gaining momentum. The entire KrakenD team remains in place, continuing to execute on the existing roadmap with more resources behind them.

The future

The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for the industry. As AI agents become more prevalent, the need for secure, efficient, and governed access to backend APIs has become critical.

KrakenD is now positioned as an AI Gateway, enabling organizations to control which APIs AI agents can access, under what limits, and with which security policies.

“With KrakenD, we are not just adding a proven infrastructure product,” says Gian Maria Gramondi, Co-founder and COO of Shop Circle. “We are laying the foundation for the next generation of AI-powered API gateways.”

Today, more than three million servers run KrakenD every month worldwide. With Shop Circle’s support, the team can accelerate AI-native capabilities and expand its global reach, while preserving the no-nonsense, engineering-first spirit that defined KrakenD from the very beginning.