UPDATED 23:23 EDT / JUNE 16 2021

BIG DATA

Commercial Apache Kafka startup Confluent to raise up to $759M in its IPO

Commercial Apache Kafka startup Confluent Inc. today set the terms of its initial public offering, seeking to raise up to $759 million on a potential $8.33 billion valuation.

Confluent announced on April 23 that it had confidentially filed to go public. Under the terms of the offering, the company will offer 23 million shares at between $29 and $33 per share.

Coming into its IPO, Confluence said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it had seen revenue jump about 58% in 2020 and 51%, to $77 million, in the first three months of this year. As of its last venture capital round in April 2020, Confluent was valued at $4.5 billion.

Founded in 2014, Confluent offers a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by companies for high-performance pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration and mission-critical applications. The company’s commercial solution is designed to enable companies to access data easily as real-time streams with support for fault-tolerant and highly scalable messaging systems, moving data from isolated systems into real-time data.

Kafka is deployed at more than 80% of the Fortune 100. Information technology teams use it to stream diagnostics information from data center infrastructure to their monitoring applications.

Marketing departments can harness Kafka to transport website activity metrics to their analytics systems. The platform owes its popularity to the fact that it supports many use cases and to its speed: Kafka can transport trillions of data points per day with latencies of just a few milliseconds.

Confluent offers its Apache Kafka offering through Confluent Cloud that’s available through Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, among others. The service is also available direct via the Confluent Platform.

Notable Confluent clients include Walmart Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH, Expedia Group Inc., The Home Depot Inc., Disney+, Hotstar and ING Groep NV.

Coming into its IPO, Confluent has raised $455.9 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Franklin Templeton Investments, Coatue and Benchmark Capital.

Confluent will list on the Nasdaq exchange under the stock ticker “CFLT.”  The exact date for the company’s IPO is not clear, but MarketWatch has Confluent listed as going public next week.

Photo: Confluent

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