Confluent

Confluent is an American data streaming company founded in 2014 by the creators of Apache Kafka, providing a fully managed cloud-native Kafka service and stream processing platform. Its products enable organisations to build real-time data pipelines and event-driven architectures across financial services, retail, telecoms, and other sectors. IBM completed an acquisition of Confluent on 17 March 2026 for approximately $11 billion; the brand and website remain operational as an IBM subsidiary.