European rooted Conduktor corrals Apache Kafka with $20 million in Accel led round

Conduktor, an all-in-one interface that simplifies working with one of the most notoriously difficult to work with data streaming platforms, Apache Kafka, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round. The investment will allow the company to continue global rollouts, hire key talent, and develop new tools and options that provide enterprise users with more visibility, control, and testing capabilities around their real-time data. To date, the firm has raised $22 million.

Written in Scala and Java, Apache Kafka is an open-source, low latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. An industry standard, and used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, it’s also notoriously difficult to work with. Frustrated by their own attempts at wrangling the service, Conduktor’s founding trio of Nicolas Orban (CEO), Stephane Maarek (CMO), and Stephane Derosiaux (CTO) set out to corral this wild pony.

Employing a familiar desktop native application, Conduktor plugs directly into Apache Kafka and makes the management of clusters, applications, and microservices all the easier. Right now, the company is targeting industries including retail, healthcare, banking, and automotive, and effectively eliminating the need for a deep in-house specialist to derive insight from Apache Kafka.

Since 2020, the startup has attracted over 60,000 users from some 9,000 companies and monetises via a three-tiered subscription model: free for individuals; a professional paid plan for small businesses with a maximum of 10 users; and an enterprise plan for larger customers and teams with a broader feature set and unlimited users.

Conduktor’s Series A round was led by Accel, and saw participation from Frontline Ventures and Aglaé Ventures.

“From the conversations we had with enterprises, it was eye-opening for us to see how Apache Kafka, while being highly strategic to companies across industries and use cases, is so hard to use,” commented Accel’s Andrei Brasoveanu. “We were impressed with Conduktor’s vision to replace the need for deep Kafka knowledge in order to get the most out of your real-time data with a simple to use and delightful solution that democratizes access to data streaming.”