Confluent Raises $250M and Kicks Off Project Metamorphosis

It’s an exciting day for Confluent, in the middle of a very unusual and difficult time in the larger world. Nonetheless, I thought it was important we share this news so our customers, partners, and community know we are pursuing our plans with the same conviction and long-term focus as before.

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised a $250 million Series E round, valuing the company at $4.5 billion. The round was led by Coatue Management with participation from Altimeter Capital and Franklin Templeton, as well as our existing investors Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. We’re thrilled to have these sophisticated, long-term oriented investors be part of our journey.

What got us here

What drives investor excitement about Confluent? The reason is simple: though new data technologies come and go, event streaming is emerging as a major new category that is on a path to be as important and foundational in the architecture of a modern digital company as databases have been.

This has hugely accelerated as we’ve brought our cloud offering, Confluent Cloud, to market. We’ve seen incredible adoption in companies big and small whether it be accelerating drug discovery and treatments with ksqlDB or collecting data streams from power tools as part of new IoT capabilities and business lines. We saw our cloud revenue grow over 450% in the last year, and are now managing over 4,500 Apache Kafka^® clusters in Confluent Cloud.

But this isn’t just about new products and businesses, event streams are at the heart of some of the most interesting reinventions of established companies. For example Walmart uses Confluent to bridge between e-commerce and brick and mortar inventory, manage products and inventory distribution in real-time, and allows its customers to interact seamlessly across all of these whether in person or through digital means, including powering Walmart’s grocery delivery services. With this real-time supply chain and a Walmart store within 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. population, Walmart has a competitive advantage and the ability to power delivery and pickup from its vast physical store base.

Project Metamorphosis: What’s next for event streaming

I’m even more excited about what is to come. Despite the uncertainty in the world, we plan to accelerate our efforts, and I believe the next eight months will have some of the most exciting product efforts Confluent has ever produced.

We are kicking off an effort that we call Project Metamorphosis. What is it? Well, we think the next major step for event streaming is going to come from reimagining what is possible with the many capabilities of modern cloud computing. This represents a significant transformation in Confluent’s software, our cloud service, and our contributions to Apache Kafka. Each and every month for the rest of the year, 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. Our first set of announcements will be the first Wednesday of May, and we’ll have successive announcements every month after for the remainder of the year.

Please join us for the exciting news.