Data streaming platform Confluent to increase India headcount by 20%

Data streaming platform Confluent will increase its headcount in India by at least 20 per cent across various engineering roles as it looks to tap into the talent base and expand its revenue streams in banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) and public sector enterprises.

 

The company had 400 employees in India around this time last year and said it would ramp up its employee base by 25 per cent.

 

"We have actually hired more than what we said and grew it by more than 50 per cent," co-founder and chief executive Jay Kreps said in an interaction. It is likely to add more than 100 people this year. As of December, Confluent had 18 per cent of its workforce in India, as per its annual report.

 

Confluent, valued at about $8.7 billion, will hire across engineering, customer solution groups, sales, and finance and operations, among others. "The Confluent Platform and Connect portfolio are fully managed by engineering teams based in India. A substantial part of the team that built Tableflow is based here," Kreps added.

 

Confluent, founded in 2014 by former LinkedIn employees, leverages Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed streaming system used by 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies for stream processing, real-time data pipelines, and data integration at scale.

 

About 30 per cent 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.

 

When asked what has led to the slower adoption of GenAI among enterprises, Kreps said a lot of it can be attributed to the model. “The model quality was not quite there. For a lot of these problems, even 98 per cent accuracy is not good enough. We need proper data harnessing and context, and hopefully, we will see higher adoption and more use cases going into production."

 

An IDC report says that many IT organisations rely on scores of data silos and a dozen or more different copies of data. These silos and redundant data stores can be a major impediment to effective AI model development.

 

The company, which counts Swiggy, Meesho, and Mobile Premier League among its clients, said India is one of its 10 largest markets in terms of revenue, with heavy adoption of its software by banks and government companies. Confluent reported revenue of $922 million for the financial year ended December 31, 2024.

 

Confluent has also tied up with Jio Platforms for Jio Cloud Services, which will help it make its cloud available on Jio Cloud, enabling companies to achieve faster data streaming.