Franz Kafka
Confluent, the corporate whose founders created Apache Kafka, confidentially filed for IPO late yesterday. In impact, this submitting was a proper intent to IPO, with key particulars such because the variety of shares and proposed worth vary nonetheless in flux.
Valued at over $4 billion, Confluent, together with firms like Databricks, might be thought-about super-unicorns, and given the inflating valuations, the query wasn’t whether or not, however when Confluent would lastly file for public providing. We’re nonetheless asking the identical factor for Databricks, whose funding has topped $1 billion and whose valuation is off the charts.
Confluent achieved unicorn standing a pair years in the past, and like fellow former unicorn (now public MongoDB), adopted its personal quasi open supply licensing to forestall cloud suppliers from monetizing the IP, not from Kafka (which stays an Apache undertaking), however all of the enterprise goodies and connectors that the corporate has constructed round it.
A pair years again, we requested the place is Confluent going, with the reply being that it’s constructing a cloud service the place you possibly can run queries and analytics straight from the firehose. A 12 months in the past, we reported the corporate drawing its final spherical (Sequence E) $250 million of funding, which coincided with the launch of the ironically-named Mission Metamorphosis, an initiative to broaden its Kafka platform right into a hybrid cloud-native occasion streaming platform. One of many components of the undertaking was lifting the bounds on knowledge storage, as reported by Huge on Information bro Andrew Brust final summer season.
Final 12 months, it reached out past its core viewers of Java builders to have interaction the SQL skilled base by increasing KSQL, its functionality to run SQL queries towards streaming knowledge with the occasion streaming database ksqlDB. And a 12 months earlier than that, it integrated options placing C++, Python, Go, and .NET with on equal footing with Java.
Extra lately, Confluent has rounded out its cloud service by making its service obtainable on the marketplaces of Azure and Google Cloud, along with AWS the place it debuted again in 2015. It has been including connectors, most lately capping it off with “premium” connectors to Oracle, which faucets into the database’s change-data-capture logs. Confluent is selling use circumstances resembling utilizing Kafka for backing up logs enabling database re-do’s; producing database snapshots; defending entry to Oracle desk change logs; and sharing Oracle knowledge on particular data modified by particular main keys. Notice that Oracle has simply come out swinging with its personal GoldenGate Cloud service designed to help these very same use circumstances.
Because the SEC submitting is confidential, nothing has been set in stone relating to when, and for a way a lot, the preliminary inventory providing will likely be made.
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