Confluent

Part of International Business Machines Corp., Confluent, Inc. is a provider of a comprehensive, cloud-native data streaming platform built around Apache Kafka, designed to enable real-time data architectures across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The company is based in Mountain View, CA. The company offers products such as Confluent Cloud (a fully managed Kafka service), Confluent Platform (on-premises deployment), Confluent Private Cloud, and Warpstream (a Kafka-compatible private cloud solution). Its platform supports seamless data streaming, integration with over 120 pre-built enterprise-grade connectors, stream governance, and advanced stream processing powered by Apache Flink, including features like TableFlow for converting Kafka topics into open table formats without ETL. Confluent’s offerings enable organizations to build event-driven microservices, generative AI, agentic AI, predictive analytics, and shift-left analytics applications by providing governed, high-quality real-time data. The platform integrates with AI ecosystems, vector databases, and custom machine learning models, and serves industries such as financial services, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, gaming, and the public sector. Use cases include fraud detection, real-time payments, inventory visibility, predictive maintenance, 5G optimization, customer personalization, and government digital modernization. The platform emphasizes reducing data infrastructure costs, improving data quality at the source, and accelerating AI innovation with real-time, event-driven data. Confluent Cloud supports high scalability, elastic autoscaling, and enterprise-grade security and compliance, with deployment flexibility across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The company was founded by Edward Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, Neha Narkhede. The CEO is Madhu Kochar. Confluent was acquired by International Business Machines Corp.