Confluent, US-based data streaming software provider that counts social network LinkedIn as an investor, revealed yesterday it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering.
The news comes a year after the company’s most recent funding round, a $250m series E led by investment manager Coatue and backed by Altimeter Capital, Franklin Templeton, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, valuing it at $4.5bn.
Confluent has built a cloud-native software platform which enables businesses to stream data from multiple sources across their organisation in real time, allowing different parts of its operations to respond to new events quickly and efficiently.
The news comes days after the company expanded into Japan and roughly a month after it hired a chief information security officer and chief legal officer for the first time.
The series E round increased Confluent’s overall funding to $456m and followed a $125m series D round in early 2019 led by Sequoia Capital and backed by Benchmark and Index Ventures at a $2.5bn valuation.
The same three investors had supplied $50m in series C funding for the company in 2017, Index Ventures and Benchmark having previously invested $24m through a series B round two years earlier.
LinkedIn, which has since been acquired by software provider Microsoft, participated in Confluent’s $6.9m series A round in 2014, which was led by Benchmark and which also featured Data Collective.
