Confluent, Inc. (CFLT)

Confluent, Inc. was a data infrastructure company headquartered in Mountain View, California, built around Apache Kafka, the open-source event streaming system. The company was founded in 2014 by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao, who had created Kafka while working at LinkedIn. Kreps served as chief executive officer for most of the company's history. Confluent's stated purpose was to make data in motion available across an organization so that applications and analytics could react to events in real time.

The company's main products were Confluent Cloud, a fully managed cloud-native service for Kafka and related streaming capabilities, and Confluent Platform, a self-managed software distribution for customers that preferred to run the technology in their own data centers or cloud accounts. Related components included Kafka Connect connectors for linking Kafka with databases and applications, ksqlDB for stream processing, and Stream Governance tools for data quality, lineage and compliance. Confluent also sold training, support and professional services.

Confluent's customers included thousands of enterprises across financial services, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing and technology. IBM described the company as serving more than 6,500 organizations, including about 40 percent of the Fortune 500. Its revenue model relied on usage-based consumption for the cloud service and subscriptions for the self-managed platform, with growth driven largely by the cloud offering.

Confluent became a public company in June 2021 through an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CFLT. The listing came during a period of strong demand for infrastructure software companies. After the offering the company continued to invest in its cloud platform, expanded partnerships with the major cloud providers, and worked to bring its operating results closer to profitability while growing revenue.

In December 2025, IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Confluent for $31.00 per share in cash, a transaction valued at about $11 billion in enterprise value. IBM said the deal was intended to combine Confluent's real-time data streaming capabilities with its own hybrid cloud, automation and artificial intelligence offerings, giving enterprises a trusted stream of data for AI applications and agents.

The acquisition was completed on March 17, 2026, after Confluent stockholders approved the merger and regulatory conditions were satisfied. At the closing, each outstanding share of Confluent common stock was converted into the right to receive $31.00 in cash, and Confluent became part of IBM. Trading in CFLT shares on Nasdaq was halted and the stock was delisted, with a Form 25 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in mid-March 2026. IBM, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, continues to trade under its existing ticker.