Confluent[1], the company whose founders created Apache Kafka[2], confidentially filed for IPO late yesterday. In effect, this filing was a formal intent to IPO, with key details such as the number of shares and proposed price range still in flux.
Valued at over $4 billion, Confluent, along with companies like Databricks[3], could be considered super-unicorns, and given the inflating valuations, the question wasn't whether, but when Confluent would finally file for public offering. We're still asking the same thing for Databricks, whose funding has topped $1 billion and whose valuation is off the charts.
Confluent achieved unicorn status a couple years ago, and like fellow former unicorn (now public MongoDB), adopted its own quasi open source licensing[4] to prevent cloud providers from monetizing the IP, not from Kafka (which remains an Apache project), but all the enterprise goodies and connectors that the company has built around it.
A couple years back, we asked where is Confluent going[5], with the answer being that it is building a cloud service where you can run queries and analytics straight from the firehose. A year ago,[6] we reported the company drawing its last round (Series E) $250 million of funding, which coincided with the launch of the ironically-named Project Metamorphosis[7], an initiative to expand its Kafka platform into a hybrid cloud-native event streaming platform. One of the elements of the project was lifting the limits on data storage[8], as reported by Big on Data bro Andrew Brust last summer.
Last year, it reached out beyond its core audience of Java developers to engage the SQL professional base by expanding KSQL[9], its capability to run SQL queries against