Confluent, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced $125 million in Series D funding for its live data streaming solutions based on Apache Kafka technology. The founders of Confluent created Apache Kafka while at LinkedIn to help cope with the very large-scale data ingestion and processing requirements of the business networking service.
Apache Kafka, an open source technology created and maintained by the founders of Confluent, acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation.
The latest funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, joined by existing investors Index Ventures and Benchmark. This brings Confluent’s total funding to $206 million.
“Industry-leading companies are re-architecting their businesses around real-time events,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO at Confluent. “With Confluent, companies can connect all of their applications and data sources, enabling them to react and engage their customers in a faster, more personalized and more efficient manner. We think event streaming has the opportunity to become as big a category in infrastructure technology as databases, and we’re excited to be creating that future.”