Confluent’s $2.5 billion valuation may provide affirmation amid open source turbulence

Confluent, a provider of open source software based on Apache Kafka, has raised $125 million (£96m) in a series D funding round putting it at a valuation of $2.5 billion. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital – whose other recent runners have included Snowflake and Cohesity – with participation from Index Ventures and Benchmark. The company sits in a very interesting position when it comes to cloud and open software. Apache Kafka, originally brought about by LinkedIn before being donated to the Apache Software Foundation, is based around stream processing and building real-time data pipelines – in essence streamlining business processes. Enterprises using Kafka to streamline their systems include eBay, The New York Times and Walmart. Confluent was founded in 2014 to provide what the company calls ‘the most complete distribution of Kafka’ and, like many platform providers of this ilk, earn clients through management and facilitating ease of use. Indeed, the founders of Confluent – Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao – were part of the LinkedIn team which originally developed Kafka.