Confluent Gets $250M In Series E Round To Reach $4.5B Valuation

Event-streaming tech startup Confluent raised $250 million in its Series E, bringing the company to a $4.5 billion valuation.

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The new round was led by Coatue Management, with participation from new investors Altimeter Capital and Frank Templeton, along with existing investors Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Mountain View, California-based Confluent now has $456 million in total funding, according to a statement from the company.

“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,” CEO Jay Kreps wrote in a blog post.

Confluent’s business rests on the idea that updates every 24 hours from “batch-processed data” isn’t enough to keep up with the speed and personalization that people want. The platform is based on Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed streaming platform.

“Every change in a bank account, update to a ride share ETA, or adjustment to a store’s inventory triggers a stream of events,” the company said in a statement. “The ability to quickly access and act on these events influences an organization’s ability to be competitive in the modern digital world.”

Along with the new funding announcement, Confluent said it would be announcing new capabilities or products on the first Wednesday of each month for the next eight months.

“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,” Kreps said in a statement. “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.”

Confluent last raised $125 million in its January 2019 Series D round, which was led by Sequoia. The company has doubled its year-over-year annual recurring revenue in 2019 and increased revenue for Confluent Cloud by more than 450 percent, according to Confluent.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias