Unfold partners with Kong to scale local partner ecosystem across ANZ market

The aim is to help partners harness opportunities as AI — and API — adoption accelerates.

Local distributor Unfold has partnered with Kong to support the channel expansion of its API technologies across Australia and New Zealand.

Unfold co-founder James Cunial said the partnership addresses a common challenge for technology vendors scaling through indirect channels — partners have limited visibility into a vendor’s current go-to-market priorities.

Unfold aims to do things differently, by equipping partners with targeted sales plays, technical positioning and use-case guidance. It also helps identify and curate opportunities aligned to current market demand.

Rather than relying on partners to self-serve, Unfold’s model brings the vendor’s narrative and commercial opportunity directly to partners, reducing time-to-engagement and helping them capture revenue sooner.

“[This] helps vendors scale through the channel with more speed, consistency and confidence,” said Cunial.

With AI adoption accelerating, Cunial said the API economy is exploding in both cost and complexity as enterprises tap into both core LLMs and the surrounding ecosystem that supports them.

“Generally speaking, and particularly in the enterprise space, AI and the surrounding tech is consumed primarily through APIs — billions upon billions of API calls a day,” he said.

However, the C-suite are scrambling to gain control, secure and reduce costs across this explosion — whilst at the same time, trying to navigate the opportunities that it may present,” he said.

Kong serves as the infrastructure and connectivity layer for organisations as their agentic AI adoption expands, and partners are the key to bringing that technology to market.

Cunial said partners have the expertise and scale to assist now in this fundamental shift in the technology landscape and its focus is putting Kong forward to help drive partner growth.

“Kong sits at the centre of where APIs and AI converge, and that opportunity is playing out right now,” he said.

For Unfold, the success metrics for the partnership are less about quantity and more about quality.

“Kong's partner ecosystem in the region is a strategic amplifier of its strength and capacity in the region,” he said.