Founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent helps organizations harness the full power of continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world.

Background:

Confluent was co-founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede in 2014 to commercialize Apache Kafka, an open-source software project the co-founders had created as colleagues at LinkedIn in 2008.

Kreps, Rao and Narkhede recognized the growing need for organizations to be able to efficiently handle and act on real-time data feeds, like LinkedIn’s own. Historically, most operational business data resided in custom-configured databases and a handful of on-premise applications. But in the late 2000s and early aughts, as data—gathered from sources ranging from cloud apps to IOT devices–began to proliferate and lower data-storage costs started allowing organizations to retain massive amounts of data, new, innovative data use-cases began to emerge. Increasingly, organizations needed the ability to make business decisions on real-time, continuously flowing data.

Kreps, Rao and Narkhede launched Confluent to provide a business solution to organizations beyond the technical, open-source community. Confluent’s cloud-native platform acts as a central nervous system for its clients, allowing them to connect all their IT systems and applications to the platform to capture real-time data streams. Harnessing real-time data using Confluent, organizations ranging in size from Fortune 100 companies to SMBs can respond intelligently to everything that happens in their business.

Battery has had a long-standing thesis on the cloud-data integration and analytics market, leading to its investments in Databricks, Collibra, InfluxData, Matillion, Sisense and Streamsets. In 2020, Battery worked with existing shareholders at Confluent to acquire a stake in the business during the company’s growth stage.

Outcome:

Confluent went public in June 2021 (NASDAQ: CFLT).