Confluent, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Confluent was founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede on September 23, 2014, in order to commercialize an open-source streaming platform Apache Kafka, created by the same founders while working at LinkedIn in 2008 as a B2B infrastructure company. Confluent's products are the Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, Connectors, Apache Flink, Stream Governance and Confluent Hub. Corporation filed for an IPO on June 1, 2021 with a valuation of $4.5 billion. IBM announced the acquisition of Confluent at a $11 billion valuation on December 8, 2025. The deal is expected to close by the middle of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Wikipedia