Confluent Inc. announced today it has raised $250 million in a late-stage funding round led by Coatue Management.

The Series E round doubles the open-source Apache Kafka startup’s total funding to $456 million and places the company’s estimated valuation at $4.5 billion.

The Confluent platform provides a paid distribution of Kafka that extends the core feature set by adding modules for real-time analysis, application orchestration and development.

The platform includes a tool known as KSQL, a cloud-based streaming database Sequential Query Language engine with scalable and fault-tolerant data ingestion that can filter, aggregate and transform that information as it arrives.

This round follows a report on March 13 that revealed the company sought to raise an approximately similar amount at the time. The previous funding round for Confluent raised $125 million in January 2019.

Following that announcement, the company launched Confluent Cloud, its Kafka-based cloud-native data streaming ingestion platform on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“We’ve seen incredible adoption in companies big and small whether it be accelerating drug discovery and treatments with KSQL or collecting data streams from power tools as part of a new Internet of Things capabilities and business lines,” Confluent Chief Executive Jay Kreps (pictured) said in the announcement. “We saw our cloud revenue grow over 450% in the last year, and are now managing over 4,500 Kafka clusters in Confluent Cloud.”

Confluent’s software has also been adopted by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to try to bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce operations by managing inventory in real time. The platform also powers the store’s ability to deliver groceries and orchestrate its supply chains.

Alongside the funding announcement, Confluent also revealed the next evolution of its platform known as Project Metamorphosis.

This project will be a significant transformation of Confluent’s software, cloud-native services and Apache Kafka contributions. Announcements about these updates are expected to release on the first Wednesday of every month in 2020 starting in May.

The objective of Project Metamorphosis is to take Confluent’s Kafka event streaming capabilities – the core of the company’s cloud-native real-time data capabilities – and transform them into a service that can support business operations at scale between servers on-premises and the cloud. That would expand Confluent’s ability to allow developers to process events as they happen and thus parse, manipulate and query the data in real time.

“This represents a significant transformation in Confluent’s software, our cloud service, and our contributions to Apache Kafka,” said Kreps. “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.”

Developers and businesses interested in Confluent’s cloud service can assess it with a free tier or sign on for consumption-based pricing, which allows enterprise users to scale their costs with traffic.

Photo: Confluent/Flickr