Big-data streaming company Confluent Inc. delivered a strong earnings and revenue beat as it posted its first-quarter financial results today, sending its stock higher in late trading.

The Mountain View, California-based company reported a net loss of $152.6 million, rising from the $112.9 million loss it posted one year earlier. Losses before certain costs such as stock compensation came to nine cents per share, while revenue jumped 38%, to $174.3 million.

Although the company’s net losses increased, Confluent’s results came in well ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of a 14-cent-per-share loss on $167.1 million in sales.

Confluent is a rising player in the big data software space. It’s the primary developer of the Apache Kafka open-source platform that’s used by enterprises to track data points such as sales, trades, orders and customer feedback in real time. This data is delivered in real-time streams, and companies can use Confluent’s proprietary software to analyze it instantly. Apache Kafka is used by as much as 80% of the Fortune 500.

The rapid growth Confluent is seeing is primarily thanks to its Confluent Cloud platform, which is an enterprise-grade version of Apache Kafka that runs on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It offers the advantage of being much simpler to deploy and manage than the open-source Kafka software.

Confluent Cloud revenue rose 89% from a year earlier, to $74 million, meaning it now accounts for just under half of the company’s total sales. Confluent said its number of customers who deliver at least $100,000 in annual recurring revenue rose 34%, to 1,075 by the end of the quarter. It also reported remaining performance obligations of $743 million, up 35%.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Jay Kreps (pictured) hailed his company’s achievement in beating all metrics during the quarter. “Achieving this high growth as companies scrutinize every dollar spent is a testament to the mission criticality of our cloud-native platform and the lower total cost of ownership customers receive from using Confluent,” he said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Confluent’s revenue growth is the result of strong demand for its big data products, but raised concerns about its rising costs and operating expenses.

“Because of this, Confluent is losing more money than it was one year earlier, and that’s not a good place for a software vendors to be in such an adverse economy,” Mueller explained. “Confluent masked this trend somewhat by reducing its loss per share, but that was only because its share count rose by almost 50%. Cost control is going to be on the horizon soon.”

Investors were no doubt delighted to see that Confluent shows no signs of slowing down. For the next quarter, the company forecast a loss of six to eight cents per share, above Wall Street’s estimate of a 10-cent-per-share loss. Confluent also forecast revenue of between $181 million and $183 million, versus the $181.4 million consensus estimate.

Confluent’s stock gained more than 6% in extended trading, reversing a decline of more than 2% during the regular trading session.

Photo: Functional TV/YouTube