Confluent's founders built the core of their product before the company existed. As engineers at LinkedIn in 2011, Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede created Apache Kafka, open-source software for moving streams of data between systems the moment they happen. In 2014 the three left to sell Kafka as a business. When Confluent went public in June 2021, it pitched data in motion as the central nervous system of every company.

Selling Free Software

Kafka was free, so Confluent had to sell something more. It started with Confluent Platform, which added tools for running Kafka inside big companies. The bigger bet was Confluent Cloud, a managed service that ran Kafka for customers so they did not need their own experts. Its pitch was that most databases handled data at rest, and modern apps needed to act on data the instant it arrived.

Thirty-Six Dollars to IBM

Confluent priced its IPO at $36 a share in June 2021 and listed on Nasdaq as CFLT. It went public with two classes of stock, and insiders held the Class B shares with extra votes. In December 2025 IBM agreed to buy Confluent for cash. The deal closed on March 17, 2026, at $31 a share, five dollars below the IPO price. Confluent left Nasdaq and became part of IBM.

Cover: The Stream in the Gorge, Rodolphe Bresdin. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a stream rushing through a gorge (data in motion).