Confluent offers a central hub for a company's data

Confluent, a Mountain View California based data analytical firm, went public today by listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The company seeks to unite all the different applications and data stores, that make up a company’s global social network, into one coherent system which reacts and responds continuously and in real-time to everything that occurs across its interconnected software systems.

This problem “hadn’t received even a fraction of the commercial or intellectual investment that data storage and databases had. When we realized this, we started to build,” says Jay Kreps, Confluent’s co-founder and chief executive.

Confluent’s platform acts as a central nervous system enabling companies to connect real time and other data from all their applications, covering their entire business operation. In one application at Citigroup, for instance, the platform connects real time such as stock prices, periodic updates such as stock holdings, and static data such as the bank’s terms and conditions for stock investors. By pulling all this data together, Confluent enables the bank to combine, analyze and display it to different users like traders, sales people and managers.

Other uses include managing passenger and driver matching at Uber, providing real-time analytics and predictive maintenance for British Gas' customers and performing numerous real-time services across LinkedIn. 

Confluent estimates it serves 70% of the Fortune 500 companies. While revenues are growing rapidly, in 2020 the company lost $230 million on $237 million in revenues.

Following today’s public listing, the company raised $828 million in capital. In trading today Confluent was valued at $11.4 billion. This is more than double its $4.5 billion valuation in 2020 as a private company, when it raised raised $250 million in a funding round, according to TechCrunch. Early investors included LinkedIn and venture funds Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.

Confluent has around 1,500 employees; its main European office is based in London. Its competitors include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon, according to Gartner.

Neha Narkhede inspired by her dad’s stories

Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede (in photo) worked on developing the platform while they were employees of LinkedIn. In 2014, they co-founded Confluent with $500,000 in initial funding from LinkedIn.  

Ganesh Srinivasan is the company’s head of engineering and product. He joined in 2018 from Uber, where he was a vice president of engineering. Earlier Srinivasan was at LinkedIn, Yahoo! and the Bangalore based technology services company Wipro. He earned a B.E. in electrical engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering in 1998. 

Narkhede, 37 years old, served as Confluent’s chief technical and product officer till 2020. A member of the company’s board of directors, her stock ownership is worth $164 million.

In 2006, after earning a B.E. in computer science from Pune University, Narkhede left India to study for an MS in Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S. Upon graduation in 2008, she joined Oracle. In 2010 she joined LinkedIn as a software engineer.

Narkhede is an advisor and investor in Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI, Cortex Data, Yugabyte, Metaphor Data, Natalist, Common Room and other start-ups.   

While growing up in India, Narkhede’s dad “selected books and told me stories of women who were trailblazers in very male-dominated fields,” she told CNBC. Stories she heard included about Kiran Bedi, a senior Indian police official, and Indra Nooyi, the Indian American who became the chief executive of PepsiCo.

As a woman trying to get ahead in a male-dominated field, her advice according to CNBC is “You want to preserve your grit and your sense of ability among quite a lot of skepticism that feeds in from the outside. Being a little deaf helps quite a bit — it’s a survival strategy.”

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