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 company said 2018 was a banner year, with 3.5X subscription bookings growth year over year. During the year, the company launched its Confluent Platform 5.0, which introduced significant new capabilities, from making infrastructure more secure, reliable and easier to manage, to enabling more powerful applications with streaming data. Confluent made KSQL generally available and released theStream Processing Cookbook, which features KSQL recipes to solve specific, domain-focused problems using KSQL. The company also launched Confluent Hub, an online service for finding, reviewing and downloading extensions for the Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform ecosystems.
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.”
