BENGALURU: Data streaming platform Confluent sees India as a huge opportunity, especially the BFSI sector, and the company, which is headquartered in Mountain View, California, is planning to increase the headcount in India by 25% this year.
It employs about 400 people in the country. Top executives at a media briefing here said that India is one of the top three markets that it is heavily focused on investing in.
Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent, said India has become the company's biggest workforce based outside the US.
Kreps is one of the original creators of Apache Kafka, an open-source technology that is used by companies to handle real-time data feeds.
He said more than 30% of the world's Kafka community members are in APAC and India alone is home to the second largest Kafka community globally after the US.
Confluent closed fiscal year 2023 by delivering its first $100 million quarter in Confluent Cloud revenue, representing growth of 46% y-o-y, and growing subscription revenue by 31% y-o-y. For FY24, Confluent expects total revenue of approximately $950 million.
Confluent attained an IPO status in 2021, raising $828 million, valuing the company at over $11 billion.
Kamal Brar, Asia Pacific and Japan senior VP of the company, said the focus will be on partnering with the Indian public sector in the next 12-18 months. The company's clients in India include Swiggy, Meesho and MPL, among others.
At Kafka Summit in Bengaluru, Confluent announced AI model inference in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink. Kreps also said that data streaming is one of the most strategic parts of the next-gen tech stack and is critical to the success of modern companies.