Confluent Raises a Series B

It is my pleasure to announce that Confluent has raised a Series B funding of $24M, led by Index Ventures and joined by our Series A investor, Benchmark. Mike Volpi of Index Ventures will be joining our board of directors.

Confluent is still a young company, but my co-founders and I have been working on Kafka for the last five years. It has been amazing to see it grow from a prototype to a system that handles hundreds of billions of events per day in some of the biggest companies in the world, and to see it flourish as an Apache project with contributions from people all over the world.

Our vision then was very much what it is today—to create an open source platform that would let us harness the kind of vast real-time streams of data that companies are beginning to grapple with. Founding the company was a way to help advance that, and this funding is the next step in that journey.

One of the most exciting parts of this has been the huge groundswell of enthusiasm around streaming data. It is amazing to see Kafka being used at the center of an ecosystem with so much innovation, and incredibly exciting to talk to our users and customers about the ambitious projects they are undertaking. When you raise money people often ask what it will be for, and in this case it’s quite easy to answer: it will be for all the things you’ve asked us for. That means additional work in Kafka on scalability, security, and simplicity; management and monitoring tools to help run at scale; and connectors and clients to help hook up all the many systems people use Kafka with.

Last but not least, our commitment to open source remains central to who we are and what Confluent is building. We believe true open source communities produce the best software, and we’re proud of the flourishing and diverse Kafka community that has developed. We promise to be a good citizen in that community and to continue our work to develop the project.