Confluent was founded in 2014 by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, and Jun Rao — the same engineers who created Apache Kafka at LinkedIn. They saw that Kafka had become critical infrastructure at LinkedIn and realized other companies needed the same real-time data streaming capabilities.
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that handles trillions of events per day at many organizations. Confluent’s commercial platform adds enterprise features on top: Confluent Cloud (fully managed Kafka), Schema Registry, ksqlDB for stream processing, connectors for hundreds of data systems, and governance tools.
Confluent Cloud eliminates the operational burden of running Kafka clusters. Customers pay based on usage rather than managing infrastructure. The service runs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Confluent Platform is the self-managed alternative for organizations that need on-premises deployment.
ksqlDB lets developers build stream processing applications using SQL-like syntax instead of writing Java or Scala code. Stream lineage and data quality features help teams track how data flows through their systems.
The company went public in June 2021. Annual revenue reached approximately $770 million in 2024, with Confluent Cloud growing at over 40% year-over-year. More than 5,000 customers use Confluent’s products, including major financial institutions, retailers, and tech companies.
Kreps remains CEO and is a recognized authority on distributed systems and data infrastructure. Confluent employs more than 3,000 people and continues to push the idea that data streaming should be as foundational to enterprises as databases.
