Confluent Streams $50M in Series C Funding to Help Advance Apache Kafka
Confluent announced on March 7 that it has raised a new $50 million Series C round of funding to help further its effort to support and commercialize Apache Kafka streaming data technology.
The funding round was led by Sequoia and included the participation of Benchmark and Index Ventures. Total funding for Confluent to date now stands at $81 million.
“As we work with companies of all sizes deploying streaming platforms and using Apache Kafka, we’re committed to providing the best platform and solutions to use real-time data across the multitude of use cases and believe Matt and Sequoia will be great additions to our team,” Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO at Confluent, said in a statement.
Confluent was founded by the creators of the open-source Apache Kafka project. Kafka has become extremely popular for enabling streaming data, both for Big Data as well as for data analytics applications.
Apache Kafka Powers Confluent Enterprise Enhancements
The Confluent Enterprise platform is based on Apache Kafka and was updated in September 2016 with new features to help enable stream processing applications. With the recent Confluent Enterprise update, new capabilities were added to enable multi-datacenter replication and cloud migration.
Additionally, Confluent Enterprise has a capability the company refers to as “auto data balancing” that helps improve the performance and availability of streaming data.
“Confluent Enterprise improves resource utilization and reliability by automatically balancing data between Kafka servers in a cluster,” Confluence stated in its product release. “Users experience a lower probability of failures or impaired performance within Kafka environments, a more efficient and operational Kafka engineering team and the ability to add nodes more easily.”
“When we first created Kafka, our vision was to unlock data sitting in silos to enable companies to draw valuable and actionable insights in real time,” Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO of Confluent, stated. “We're building a streaming platform to make it easy to put stream processing in practice for organizations of any size and will continue to release features that help our customers along this journey.”
It's a journey that has been embraced by a growing number of customers. On Feb. 1 Confluence announced it's had 700 percent subscription bookings growth year-over-year.
“Data has become the currency of the modern business,” Matt Miller, partner at Sequoia, said in a statement. “Confluent's streaming platform makes that information easily accessible across public/private clouds, microservices and existing systems.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EntepriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
