Data streaming company Confluent to boost India headcount by 25%

Data streaming company Confluent will boost its workforce in India by 25% this year to support growing demand, a top company executive said here on Thursday.

Jay Kreps, chief executive of Confluent, said India has become the company’s biggest workforce based outside of the US. “To support the growing demand in India, Confluent plans to increase the local headcount by 25% in 2024,” he said at a select media briefing.

Confluent’s global headcount is 2,744, of which over 400 are in Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai, who mostly work remotely. Their India operations are about five years old.

Kreps is one of the original creators of Apache Kafka, an open-source technology used by more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies to handle real-time data feeds efficiently.

Kamal Brar, Asia Pacific and Japan senior vice president of the company, said in the next 12-18 months the focus will be on partnering with the Indian public sector. The BFSI sector forms their largest customer base. “Four of the five top private banks in India are leveraging open-source Kafka or Confluent, and count as our customers,” Brar told ET.

Ecommerce company Meesho, food delivery company Swiggy, media company Viacom18 and online gaming company Mobile Premier League are some of their existing clients. Confluent attained an IPO status in 2021, raising $828 million and valuing the company at over $11 billion.

Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent, told ET, “We have a significant development team in India that includes product management, design and engineering, which is a free-standing innovation centre for us. It’s projected to grow faster than all our other innovation centres.”

Around 30% of the company’s streaming community is in the Asia Pacific region, which includes streaming developers and people building products in streaming outside the US.

“Ultimately, it is about the scale. Some of the cloud services are expensive. In a consumption model, which most of our customers prefer, they get a much better deal,” Brar said, adding that they have introduced freight clusters, a new cluster type for Confluent Cloud that provides a cost-effective way to handle large volume use cases that aren’t time sensitive.

Clowes explained that typically the “financial services industry is in the business of moving bits like they’re in the business of moving information and turning information into dollars. BFSIs must have reliable, high-speed, traceable data, which is what Kafka provides”.