Confluent

confluent.io Revenue $1.16 Billion Confluent is the enterprise data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka that lets companies process live events like payments, orders and sensor data in real time, and it is now owned by IBM which bought it for about $11 billion in March 2026. It ended 2025 with 6,690 customers including roughly 40% of the Fortune 500 and grew revenue 21% with its cloud segment alone growing 27%. Customers include BMW, L'Oreal, Michelin and Ticketmaster and the platform runs across 60+ cloud regions on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Money comes from cloud usage and software subscriptions, about 96% of revenue, paid for compute and data transfer rather than per-seat fees. Around 3,241 employees worked at Confluent across 27 countries before the IBM deal and it owns no factories or stores because its product is pure software and cloud. Confluent was still unprofitable with a $295 million loss in 2025 though it earned positive operating income excluding stock pay.