Confluent, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Confluent was founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede on September 23, 2014, in order to commercialize an open-source streaming platform Apache Kafka, created by the same founders while working at LinkedIn in 2008 as a B2B infrastructure company.[1][2] Confluent's products are the Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, Connectors, Apache Flink, Stream Governance and Confluent Hub.
Corporation filed for an IPO on June 1, 2021 with a valuation of $4.5 billion.[3] IBM announced the acquisition of Confluent at a $11 billion valuation on December 8, 2025.[4] The deal completed on 17 March, 2026[5]
In 2025, Confluent launched Confluent Intelligence, a fully managed service on Confluent Cloud providing AI-powered capabilities including anomaly detection, fraud detection, and forecasting for real-time data streams.[6].
External links
References
- Confluent, the foundational platform for data-in-motion Battery, June 24, 2021^
- Neha Narkhede changing the face of superstar developers (she co-created Apache Kafka and Confluent!) www.linkedin.com, retrieved 2024-06-11^
- Confluent's IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets Tech Crunch, June 2, 2021, retrieved June 11, 2024^
- IBM to Acquire Confluent Confluent, retrieved 2025-12-08^
- IBM Completes Acquisition of Confluent, Making Real Time Data the Engine of Enterprise AI and Agents IBM Newsroom, retrieved 2026-03-17^
- Can Confluent Intelligence solve the biggest data challenges in AI? CRN Asia, retrieved 2026-03-21^