Confluent

Confluent, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Confluent was founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede on September 23, 2014, in order to commercialize an open-source streaming platform Apache Kafka, created by the same founders while working at LinkedIn in 2008 as a B2B infrastructure company. Confluent's products are the Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, Connectors, Apache Flink, Stream Governance and Confluent Hub. Corporation filed for an IPO on June 1, 2021 with a valuation of $4.5 billion. IBM announced the acquisition of Confluent at a $11 billion valuation on December 8, 2025. The deal completed on March 17, 2026. In 2025, Confluent launched Confluent Intelligence, a fully managed service on Confluent Cloud providing AI-powered capabilities including anomaly detection, fraud detection, and forecasting for real-time data streams.