Founded in 2014 by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede, the original creators of Apache Kafka - an open-source streaming data project - Confluent offers a streaming platform that empowers companies to easily access data as real-time streams.
By using Confluent, companies benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease-of-use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most intelligent global companies to run their business in real-time.
While most companies are affected by the downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Confluent has continued to thrive. First, the company announced that its annual recurring revenue roughly doubled and revenue for Confluent's managed cloud service more than quadrupled. It's only been a few months since it released version 5.4 of its enterprise platform which addressed security concerns, and a new multi-region cluster capability that supports asynchronous replication across different data centers.
The company also announced a $250 million Series E funding round, proof that investments are still possible despite the economic climate. This funding now brings its valuation to $4.5 billion.
Following the announcement of the funding, the company also launched Confluent Cloud, its Kafka-based cloud-native data streaming platform on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“We’ve seen incredible adoption in companies big and small whether it be accelerating drug discovery and treatments with KSQL or collecting data streams from power tools as part of a new Internet of Things capabilities and business lines,” Confluent Chief Executive Jay Kreps said in the announcement. “We saw our cloud revenue grow over 450% in the last year, and are now managing over 4,500 Kafka clusters in Confluent Cloud.”
Confluent is mirroring the confidence of its investors, with big plans promised for the rest of 2020.
“As part of this we’re going to have a major new set of capabilities for our cloud service, and for open-source Kafka, and for our product that we’re going to announce every month for the rest of the year,” Kreps told TechCrunch. “We want to continue to advance, even in these really weird uncertain times.”
However, the company's biggest announcement is "Project Metamorphosis," which intends to transform Kafka event streaming into a cloud-native service with on-premise data sources. This is set to be the central theme for the rest of the year.
