Confluent IPO: Data In (Upward) Motion

In late 2014, we met a company that was building an entirely new data infra­struc­ture. That company, Confluent, wanted to help orga­ni­za­tions manage and make sense of the over­whelming flow of data modern businesses generate to enable more intelligent – and more accountable – decisions. Alongside our friends at Benchmark, we enthu­si­as­ti­cally partic­i­pated in Confluent’s Series A and the company was off to the races.

Though we knew at the time that Confluent was building a data infra­struc­ture that would change the way companies interact with their data, we had no idea just how impactful it would be. After raising over $800m in its IPO, the company’s stock climbed 24% in its first few hours of trading. Tying together all the data that exists at an orga­ni­za­tion – across various cloud services or on-premises servers – is a daunting task, but orga­ni­za­tions the world over are benefitting from Confluent’s ability to provide real-time insight, leading to optimal business outcomes for customers like Citigroup, Humana, Intel, and Walmart.

Confluent is the 6^th DCVC portfolio company to make its exit to the public market since December, joining AbCellera (Nasdaq: ABCL), Recursion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (Nasdaq: RXRX), Zymergen (Nasdaq: ZY), Desktop Metal (NYSE: DM) and Lucira Health (Nasdaq: LHDX). Four others are poised to join them through announced SPAC trans­ac­tions or highly-anticipated IPOs currently on the calendar (Rocket Lab, Evolv Technology, Embark Trucks and SentinelOne).

These companies span multiple different industries, from curing diseases to opening space for exploration, but they all share a common thread in their Deep Tech foundation. Since defining the term more than 20 years ago, we’ve known that Deep Tech combines novel compute and scientific break­throughs to dramat­i­cally reduce the capex and opex required to attack previously intractable problems in nearly any industry. Where a company like Recursion is the embodiment of that thesis, Confluent is an example of the critical technology infra­struc­ture necessary to make Deep Tech successes possible.

With IPO day behind it, Confluent can now focus on growing its business as a public company. We’re happy to have been along for journey so far and are eager to see the continued evolution of this impressive platform. Congrat­u­la­tions to the entire Confluent team on so many years of hard work and a successful IPO!