Confluent, Inc.

Confluent is a data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka. Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao founded it in 2014 in Mountain View, California. These three originally created Kafka at LinkedIn, and then built Confluent to provide an enterprise-grade platform for processing and analyzing data in real time.

The flagship offering is Confluent Cloud, a fully managed data streaming service on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It removes the complexity of running Kafka yourself. You get automatic scaling, multi-tenancy, schema management, connectors to hundreds of systems, stream processing through Apache Flink, and enterprise security. Confluent Platform is the self-managed version for customers who want it in their own data centers.

Data streaming enables real-time applications and event-driven architectures. A bank might process financial transactions in real time for fraud detection. A retailer could synchronize inventory events across the supply chain as they happen. A streaming service might personalize recommendations based on what users are doing right now. These are the kinds of problems Confluent solves.

The platform extends Kafka's core with Schema Registry for data governance, Kafka Connect for pre-built connectors to 200+ systems, ksqlDB for stream processing with SQL, Cluster Linking for connecting Kafka across regions, and Stream Governance for data lineage and quality. Confluent positions itself as the central nervous system connecting all of an organization's systems.

The target audience is development teams and data engineers at mid-to-large enterprises. The go-to-market mixes product-led growth, where developers adopt Confluent Cloud with consumption-based pricing, with enterprise sales for larger accounts. The Apache Kafka open-source community provides a massive developer funnel.

Annual revenue is roughly $960 million. Cloud revenue, which is consumption-based, grows over 35% and now represents more than 55% of total revenue. Gross margins run about 72%, with cloud margins improving at scale. Net revenue retention exceeds 115%.

Confluent is positioning data streaming as critical infrastructure for real-time AI. AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation applications need fresh, contextual data, which is exactly what a streaming platform delivers. With about 3,500 employees and over 5,400 customers, including most of the Fortune 500, Confluent leads the shift from batch data processing to real-time streaming.