According to TechCrunch, Confluent has raised $6.9 million in funding led by Benchmark. LinkedIn and Data Collective also invested in the round.

Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

Apache Kafka, an open source technology created by the founders of Confluent, acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data, and device instrumentation. It's key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements--from batch systems like Hadoop, to realtime systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as it arrives.

This infrastructure lets you build around a single central nervous system transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within your company.