New investors Altimeter Capital and Franklin Templeton joined existing investors Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital who also participated in the round, bringing Confluent's total funding to $456 million. The adoption of event streaming as the platform for all current and historical data is rapidly accelerating as demand for real-time digital experiences are higher than ever. This groundswell of adoption led Confluent to double its annual recurring revenue year over year in 2019 and increase Confluent Cloud revenue more than 450 percent year over year. The acceleration of event streaming as the data infrastructure for real-time organizations has propelled Confluent's valuation to $4.5 billion.

"In every industry, companies are moving to real time as they digitally transform their businesses. This has made event streaming a critical platform for enterprise IT," said Kevin Wang, partner, Altimeter Capital. "Confluent has the unique product-market fit, leadership, and customer focus to help organizations become agile, event-driven winners in the new digital economy."

Apache Kafka® Ignited a World of Event Streaming

Traditional 24-hour updates from batch-processed data cannot keep up with the speed and personalization people demand. Data in motion, otherwise known as event streams, has become the basis of today's digital experiences. Every change in a bank account, update to a rideshare ETA, or adjustment to a store's inventory triggers a stream of events. The ability to quickly access and act on these events influences an organization's ability to be competitive in the modern digital world.

That is why Kafka ignited the event streaming trend that quickly gained traction with Fortune 500 companies. But, the full power of Kafka can only be unlocked when it serves as a central nervous system for the entire organization. This stage of event streaming maturity is marked by all the data in an organization becoming instantly available to all applications and people through the event streaming platform. As a result, new business can be uncovered, customer experiences exceeded, and new operational efficiencies realized.

However, building and scaling event-driven applications is notoriously challenging as sources for event data often span across on premises, multiple clouds, microservices, and more distributed environments. This resulted in Kafka becoming the highest paid technical skill in the United States, putting pervasive event streaming out of reach for most organizations.

"Confluent is re-architecting businesses around event streaming which helps to modernize applications," said Thomas Laffont, co-founder, Coatue Management. "We believe Confluent is a thought leader in event streams and we look forward to seeing how the team advances the space with game-changing products like Confluent Cloud."

Project Metamorphosis: Event Streaming's Next Act

Confluent was created by the original founders of Apache Kafka, using their exceptional Kafka expertise to ensure that any company can harness the power of event streaming at scale. Confluent launched the industry's first event streaming platform built for the enterprise. Now, organizations in every major industry, can run real-time, event-driven applications supported by the expertise of the founders of event streaming.

As a part of Confluent's relentless pursuit to ensure that any organization can make event streaming the central nervous system for their business, it is initiating the next generation of event streaming through Project Metamorphosis. With Project Metamorphosis, Confluent will solve the most pressing issues that organizations run into when making event streaming a pervasive part of their business, and provide the solution as a fully hosted platform in Confluent Cloud.

Over the next eight months beginning in May, Confluent will announce major capabilities or highlight new product announcements on the first Wednesday of each month. Each release in 2020 will address the major technical challenges organizations face when putting event streaming at the heart of their business, and 2021 will kick off the next wave of innovation that will transform how businesses serve their customers.

"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 Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder, Confluent. "Event streaming has set the new standard for how data can be leveraged across an organization as a continuous stream of real-time events. We're looking forward to helping more companies put event streaming at the heart of their businesses to deliver the real-time, contextual experiences customers demand."

Additional Resources:

Read Jay's perspective on this funding round and Project Metamorphosis in his blog post: https://www.confluent.io/blog/series-e-round-metamorphosis

Sign up for updates on Project Metamorphosis: https://www.confluent.io/project-metamorphosis

Learn more about Confluent's milestones from 2019: https://www.confluent.io/press-release/confluent-experiences-rapid-growth-as-companies-adopt-event-streaming

See how Confluent is helping its customers transform their businesses: https://www.confluent.io/customers/

Learn more about Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/

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. 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.

Apache® and Apache Kafka® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.