Conduktor Inc., a startup that specializes in making the popular Apache Kafka data streaming platform easier to use, on Monday announced that it has closed a $20 million investment led by Accel.

Frontline Ventures and Aglaé Ventures participated as well. 

Kafka is a software platform used by about 80% of the Fortune 100, as well as thousands of other companies, to facilitate the transfer of data between their internal applications. Information technology teams can use Kafka to stream diagnostics data from servers to a troubleshooting tool. A marketing department could harness the software to synchronize ad performance data between analytics applications. 

The reason for Kafka’s popularity is that it can transfer large amounts of data quickly and with a high degree of reliability. The software is capable of sending as many billions of individual records per second. Fault-tolerance features help reduce the risk of data loss and other technical errors.

But alongside the operational benefits that Kafka promises to unlock, the software comes with certain drawbacks. One of the biggest challenges is that the platform can be complicated to operate at scale.

Conduktor, founded last year, provides a desktop application that promises to simplify many common tasks involved in building and running Kafka clusters. The result: a promised 34% reduction in the amount of time required to operate Kafka deployments.

Kafka moves data between applications such as analytics tools using topics, which are channels for transferring specific types of information. A “website traffic” topic, or instance, might contain data about the current number of shoppers visiting an online store. Applications such as website traffic analytics tools can subscribe to a topic to continuously receive new information as it’s generated.

Conduktor’s desktop client provides tools that promise to simplify the task of managing topics and the workloads that subscribe to them. Managing schemas is another task that the startup aims to ease. Schemas are files that define the format in which data is sent to applications via Kafka. An incorrectly configured schema can lead to data formatting issues that make it difficult for applications to process information.

Many organizations use Kafka not only to transfer records between workloads but also to process them. Kafka includes features that make it possible to process data in real time before it’s loaded into an application. The software can filter duplicate records, change the data format of files to make them easier for workloads to process and perform other operations.

Conduktor offers features that allow companies to monitor the data operations carried out by their Kafka clusters for errors. Additionally, the startup’s application helps with certain related management tasks. 

The company says that its application allows developers to perform tasks that normally require more than a half-dozen different tools using a single product. The benefits, the startup promises, extend beyond merely saving time.

The complexity of Kafka clusters often requires companies to build custom code and workflows to manage data processing operations. The more customization is required, the greater the risk of implementation errors that can delay the deployment process and potentially cause technical issues down the line. Conduktor says its features for simplifying Kafka deployments lower the risk of implementation issues by reducing overall operational complexity. 

Conduktor will use its new $20 million in funding to enhance its desktop application. In conjunction, the startup is developing a new suite of products to ease additional data management tasks for users. According to Conduktor, it has more than 60,000 users across more than 9,000 companies. 

Photo of Conduktor founders: Conduktor