Confluent Experiences Rapid Growth as More Companies Adopt Event Streaming in Race to Deliver Real-Time Customer Experiences

Revenue for Confluent Cloud grew more than 450 percent with company’s annual recurring revenue nearly doubling

Mountain View, Calif. – February 19, 2020 – Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, announced 2019 results, which include annual recurring revenue (ARR) growing almost 100 percent year over year. As companies face immense pressure to be more agile and responsive to demands for real-time experiences, they turn to Confluent’s event streaming platform to harness insights from data as it happens across all environments. Organizations around the world, including Bosch Power Tools, Credit Suisse, Rakuten Card and many more, have implemented Confluent to create real-time applications, services and experiences powered by event streaming.

With the number of applications and services growing and spanning on premises and cloud, the challenge of moving, processing and scaling data between environments with security and ease becomes exponentially harder. The need for a fully managed streaming platform that can capture real-time event data from any environment without added operational burden was evident by the rapid adoption of Confluent Cloud. In 2019, revenue for Confluent Cloud increased by more than 450 percent year over year.

“The availability of real-time data is changing the way we live and the types of systems we build; however, many organizations are not ready to deal with this constant flow of information,” said David Menninger, senior vice president and research director, Ventana Research. “To overcome these barriers and capitalize on the opportunities that real-time stream processing creates, organizations should consider adopting an event-centric approach to information architecture. A common pipeline of real-time event information eliminates the need for point-to-point communications between these applications and services and provides greater agility to an organization seeking to expand its real-time processing capabilities.”

In the past year, the popularity of Apache Kafka® soared. As one of the highest paying and most in-demand tech skills in the industry, Kafka has experienced a groundswell of adoption. Its highly durable, fault-tolerant properties make it uniquely positioned to thrive as a single source of truth for all data. As a company founded by the original creators of Kafka, Confluent makes it possible for any organization to put Kafka’s event streaming at the heart of its business. With enterprise-ready security, scalability and ease of use, organizations are able to leverage event streaming in critical, production environments.

“More organizations are shifting to modern infrastructures, like hybrid cloud and microservices, to be able to fulfill the instant gratification consumers expect at every touch point,” said Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder, Confluent. “Meeting consumers’ high expectations for responsive, personalized digital services hinges on the ability to harness real-time data from every edge of an organization, across on-premises and multiple cloud environments. Confluent is purpose-built to be the central nervous system for data that propels organizations to find success in this new technology paradigm.”

Confluent Business Momentum

• Grew ARR nearly 100 percent year over year with revenue for Confluent Cloud increasing more than 450 percent year over year.
• Broadened leadership team with Erica Schultz, former chief revenue officer at New Relic, as president of field operations; Roger Scott, former executive vice president and chief customer officer at New Relic, as Confluent’s first-ever chief customer officer; and Damien Wong, former vice president and general manager of Asian growth and emerging markets at Red Hat, as vice president of APAC.
• Appointed Jonathan Chadwick to Confluent’s Board of Directors as the company’s first independent director.
• Welcomed the PipelineDB team to Confluent for their vast wealth of experience, spanning both databases and stream processing.
• Reached 1,000 employees across 20 global offices including a new headquarters in Mountain View and new offices in Bengaluru, San Francisco and Austin.
• In addition to earning a top 10 ranking on Forbes Cloud 100 and one of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2020, Confluent was named a 2019 LinkedIn Top Startup to Work For, Battery Ventures Highest-Rated Cloud Computing Companies to Work For, and made Comparably’s list for best company culture, CEO and diversity.

Product Innovation

• Launched ksqlDB, an event streaming database to unify the multiple systems involved in stream processing into a single, easy-to-use solution for building event streaming applications.
• Introduced cloud-native capabilities on Confluent Cloud that enable unparalleled elastic scalability and consumption-based pricing. Confluent Cloud was also made available on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, making it the only platform for managed Kafka as a service that offers true freedom of choice.
• Released Confluent Platform 5.3, which delivered the new Confluent Operator for cloud-native automation on Kubernetes and a preview of Role-Based Access Control for enterprise-grade security (now fully available in the recently released Confluent Platform 5.4). Confluent Platform 5.2 was also announced with the introduction of a new Developer License that enables all commercial features of Confluent Platform to run for free on single-broker Kafka clusters.
• Surpassed 100 supported connectors for Kafka, which boosts developer productivity with instant connections to popular data sources and sinks.
• Named a Gartner Peer Insights 2019 Customers’ Choice for Event Stream Processing Market, and also earned recognitions from Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan.

Apache Kafka Community Highlights

• Worked with the community to make Kafka one of the most dynamic open source projects with more than 50,000 meetup members across 201 global meetup groups and over 2,145 individual code commits.
• Launched the Confluent Community Catalyst Program to recognize individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the Kafka community and open source technology.
• Organized Kafka Summits in San Francisco, New York and London with more than 4,000 attendees and over 60 sponsors across all three events.

Supporting Quotes from Lead Investors

• “The shift to event streaming is changing 40 years of application architecture, and it is causing people to reimagine how they’d build modern, real-time, connected applications. Confluent plays an integral role in leading organizations through this paradigm shift with the expertise of the people who developed this new approach.” – Eric Vishria, general partner, Benchmark
• “Confluent is building an interconnected system of all the data a company holds and the applications of that data. Given their technology leadership, and the fact that most businesses will only have one infrastructure dedicated to that, their opportunity is massive.” – Mike Volpi, partner, Index Ventures
• “All companies – big to small, modern to legacy incumbents – are making event streaming a central nervous system for their data. This gives Confluent the potential to build a massive, enduring company.” – Matt Miller, partner, Sequoia Capital

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View and London, with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

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