As companies process ever-increasing amounts of data, moving it in real-time is a massive challenge for organizations. Confluent is a streaming data platform built on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project designed to process enormous numbers of events. Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps will join us at TC Sessions: SaaS on October 27 for a fireside chat to discuss this and more.
Data is a big part of the story we tell at the SaaS event, as it has a critical role in every business. Kreps has said that the data streams are at the core of every industry, from sales to orders to customer experiences. As he wrote in a company blog post announcing the company’s $250 million Series E in April 2020, Confluent is working to process all of this data in real-time — which was a big reason investors were willing to pour so much money into the company.
“The reason is simple: though new data technologies come and go, event streaming is emerging as a major new category that is on a path to be as important and foundational in the architecture of a modern digital company as databases have been,” Kreps wrote.
Many startups have been built on open source to help simplify whatever the project does, and Confluent and Kafka are no different. The company’s streaming data platform takes a multi-faceted approach to streaming and builds on the open-source Kafka project. While anyone can download and use Kafka, as with many open-source projects, companies may lack the resources or expertise to handle the raw open-source code.
Kreps told us 2017 that companies using Kafka as a core technology include Netflix, Uber, Cisco, and Goldman Sachs. But those companies have the resources to manage complex software like this. Mere mortal companies can pay Confluent to access a managed cloud version, handle it themselves, and install it in the cloud infrastructure provider. The project was born at LinkedIn in 2011 when their engineers were tasked with building a tool to process the enormous number of events flowing through the platform. The company eventually open-sourced the technology it had created, and Apache Kafka was born.
Confluent launched in 2014 and raised over $450 million along the way. Today, it has a market cap of over $17 billion. In April 2020, the company scored a $4.5 billion valuation on a $250 million investment in its last private round. In addition to our discussion with Kreps, the conference will include Google’s Javier Soltero, Amplitude’s Olivia Rose, and investors Kobie Fuller and Casey Aylward, among others. It’s going to be a thought-provoking lineup. We hope you’ll join us. Buy your pass now to save up to $100 when you book by October 1. We can’t wait to see you in October!
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