LinkedIn Spinout Confluent Has Just Filed to Go Public

LinkedIn spinout Confluent, whose founders built the technology inside of LinkedIn, has filed for an IPO this week.

With an annualized revenue of over $300 million, the company became a separate company from LinkedIn back in 2014. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in a private financing round last year.

Confluent filed for an IPO on Tuesday and said first-quarter revenue climbed 51% to $77 million. Most of the company’s sales came through subscriptions. Let loss widened to $44.5 million from $33.6

Confluent’s software is Apache Kafka, which got its start inside of LinkedIn. The company sells software that developers can use to quickly move data for use inside applications. Confluent seeks to become the latest enterprise business to go from open-source project to multibillion-dollar public company.

Founders Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede created Kafka in 2011 and then formed Confluent in 2014 with an investment of about $500,000 from LinkedIn.

“We rolled it out at scale for early use cases at LinkedIn, handling data streams with billions of messages,” Kreps, Confluent’s CEO, wrote in a letter in the prospectus. “But even then, our ambition was bigger. Kafka was built to be open source, and we wanted it to do much more than serve one use case in one company.”

Confluent, which has close to 1,500 employees, said in its prospectus that over 70% of Fortune 500 companies are estimated to have used Kafka. Customers include Citigroup, Humana, Intel and Walmart, according to the company’s website.

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters of the IPO.

The stock will trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol “CFLT.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.