Aklivity, a company pioneering streaming API management, announced an oversubscribed $4.1M seed round led by 468 Capital with participation from Pear VC, Alumni Ventures and an angel syndicate including former NGINX CEO Gus Robertson and DigitalOcean founder Mitch Wainer.

Aklivity is building a universal API layer for streaming architectures. Its open source universal API gateway, Zilla, provides a unified, external interface to event-driven services and data. Zilla natively supports a range of network and messaging protocols, including Kafka. This enables it to expose event-streams to clients over their APIs of choice. Non-Kafka apps can now publish and subscribe to Kafka topics without the need for intermediary brokers, services and even Kafka Connect.