- Event streaming platform company Confluent announced it closed a $250 million Series E round led by Coatue Management
Event streaming platform company Confluent announced it closed a $250 million Series E round led by Coatue Management. New investors Altimeter Capital and Franklin Templeton joined existing investors Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital for this round. Including this funding round, Confluent has raised a total of $456 million.
Confluent has doubled its annual recurring revenue year over year in 2019 and the company saw an increase of Confluent Cloud revenue more than 450% year over year. The acceleration of event streaming as the data infrastructure for real-time organizations has also propelled Confluent’s valuation to $4.5 billion.
Traditional 24-hour updates from batch-processed data are unable to keep up with the speed and personalization people demand. And data in motion — otherwise known as event streams — has become the basis of today’s digital experiences. Every change in a bank account, update to a rideshare ETA, or adjustment to a store’s inventory triggers a stream of events. The ability to quickly access and act on these events influences an organization’s ability to be competitive in the modern digital world.
That is why Kafka ignited the event streaming trend, which quickly gained traction with Fortune 500 companies. However, the full power of Kafka can only be tapped when it serves as a central nervous system for the entire organization.
This stage of event streaming maturity is marked by all the data in an organization becoming available to all apps and people through the event streaming platform. This way, businesses can be uncovered, customer experiences exceeded, and new operational efficiencies achieved.
Building and scaling event-driven applications can be challenging as sources for event data often span across on-premises, multiple clouds, microservices, and more distributed environments. This resulted in Kafka becoming the highest-paid technical skill in the US, putting pervasive event streaming out of reach for most organizations.
In the next 8 months starting in May, Confluent will announce major capabilities or highlight new product announcements on the first Wednesday of each month. Every release in 2020 will address the major technical challenges organizations face when putting event streaming at the heart of their business. And 2021 will kick off the next wave of innovation that will transform how businesses serve their customers.
Key Quotes:
“In every industry, companies are moving to real-time as they digitally transform their businesses. This has made event streaming a critical platform for enterprise IT. Confluent has the unique product-market fit, leadership, and customer focus to help organizations become agile, event-driven winners in the new digital economy.”
-Kevin Wang, partner at Altimeter Capital
“Confluent is re-architecting businesses around event streaming which helps to modernize applications. We believe Confluent is a thought leader in event streams and we look forward to seeing how the team advances the space with game-changing products like Confluent Cloud.”
-Thomas Laffont, co-founder at Coatue Management
“Today’s high expectations for on-demand services has given rise to a new data infrastructure paradigm where data is no longer just a static database of information. Event streaming has set the new standard for how data can be leveraged across an organization as a continuous stream of real-time events. We’re looking forward to helping more companies put event streaming at the heart of their businesses to deliver the real-time, contextual experiences customers demand.”
-Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder at Confluent
