Series E Funding Round Doubles Confluent's Valuation to $4.5 Billion

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Wednesday, July 01, 2020

Confluent raises $250M from its Series E Funding, increasing its valuation to $4.5 billion

Fremont, CA: Confluent raises $250 million from a late-stage funding round led by Coatue Management. The input of funds from the Series E round doubles the open-source Apache Kafka startup’s total funds to $456 million and places the company’s estimated valuation to $4.5 billion. The platform by Confluent offers a paid distribution of Kafka that expands the core feature set with the addition of modules for real-time analysis, application orchestration, and development. The platform also includes a tool called KSQL, a cloud-based streaming database Sequential Query Language engine with scalable and fault-tolerant data ingestion that filters, aggregates, and transforms the information as it receives immediately.

The Series E round follows a report that reveals the company looked to raise approximately the same amount of funding at the time. Confluent raised $125 million in its previous financing round.

After the funding round, the company launched Confluent Cloud, its Kafka-based cloud-native data streaming ingestion on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“We’ve seen incredible adoption in companies big and small, whether it be accelerating drug discovery and treatments with KSQL or collecting data streams from power tools as part of a new Internet of Things capabilities and business lines,” Confluent Chief Executive Jay Kreps (pictured) said in the announcement. “We saw our cloud revenue grow over 450 percent in the last year, and are now managing over 4,500 Kafka clusters in Confluent Cloud.”

Wal-Mart Stores also adopts confluent’s software as a part of efforts to bridge the gap between the brick-and-mortar and e-commerce operations by managing inventory in real-time. The platform also powers the store’s capacity to deliver groceries and orchestrate its supply chains. Alongside funding, the company also revealed the next evolution of its platform - Project Metamorphosis.

“This represents a significant transformation in Confluent’s software, our cloud service, and our contributions to Apache Kafka,” said Kreps. “We will announce a major new set of product capabilities, organized around the core tenets we think should be mandatory for cloud infrastructure. Taken together, we believe these will set the bar for this emerging space and lay the foundation for what we plan to do over our next five years.”