Streaming data juggernaut Confluent announces $50M in Series C funding

Confluent, the principal commercial entity behind the Apache Kafka streaming data platform, is this morning announcing the companys $50M Series C funding round. Kreps also explained the new money will help the company double down on the platform to make it as good as the team possibly can. Confluents press release on the funding round explains that the company had over 700% ACV (annual contract value) subscription bookings growth in 2016, nearly tripled the number of employees, and onboarded new customers including Priceline.com, Surescripts, TiVo and Zopa. This follows in the tradition of many open source Big Data projects, including HBase and Hadoop itself, which grew out of bespoke work done at various large Internet companies to meet needs that simply outstripped what commercially available platforms could handle. Meanwhile, Confluent is a company led by bright, accomplished people providing real value and stoking a growing ecosystem.