Streaming Big Data Startup Confluent Raises Impressive $250M In New Funding

Company launches “Project Metamorphosis” to address the challenges organizations face when building event streaming into their business operations.

Big data startup Confluent has raised a stunning $250 million in Series E funding, pushing the market valuation of the developer of event stream processing software to $4.5 billion.

The funding announcement comes as the company reports that annual recurring revenue doubled in 2019 – including 450 percent growth in its Confluent Cloud sales – and launches an initiative called “Project Metamorphosis” to develop new products and capabilities that help customers adopt its event streaming platform.

The new financing brings Confluent’s total funding to $456 million. The round was led by Coatue Management with new investors Altimeter Capital and Franklin Templeton participating in the round along with existing investors Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

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Event stream processing technology provides a way for businesses and organizations to manage and act on data that is continuously produced, such as streams of business transactions, performance data generated by operational IT or manufacturing systems, or telemetry from sensors and other edge devices. Handling such event streams or “data in motion” is a common challenge in today’s big data world.

Confluent’s flagship product, the Confluent Platform, provides the capability to organize and manage the massive volumes of streaming data being generated by businesses today and make the data available to business applications and information workers. The product is based on Apache Kafka, an open-source stream processing system that was developed by Confluent’s founders – including CEO Jay Kreps – when they worked at LinkedIn. Mountain View, Calif.-based Confluent was founded in 2014.

The company works with a range of consulting, OEM, cloud service and technology partners.

“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,” said Kreps, in a statement announcing the new funding. “Event streaming has set the new standard for how data can be leveraged across an organization as a continuous stream of real-time events.”

But implementing Apache Kafka and building it into an organization’s business processes can be a challenge given that event data may span on-premises systems, multiple cloud systems, applications and microservices, Confluent says in its earnings statement, “putting pervasive event streaming out of reach for most organizations.”

To that end Confluent announced Project Metamorphosis, an effort to solve the most pressing issues that organizations run up against when trying to make event streaming part of their business. Over the next eight months the company will develop solutions, delivered through the Confluent Cloud hosted platform, to “address the major technical challenges organizations face when putting event streaming at the heart of their business,” Confluent said.

The company promised to announce a new product or capability on the first Wednesday of every month through the year.