In 2022, Confluent, the global data streaming company, announced the Confluent for Startups program, which focused on providing Confluent Cloud credits to early-stage startups working to launch their streaming initiatives. By 2023, the company had worked with over 250 startups to help them put their data in motion.
Building on this momentum, Confluent, along with global venture capitalists like Matt Miller, Sequoia Capital, Erik Vishria, Benchmark Capital, and Carlos Gonzalez-Candenas, Index Ventures, announced the launch of the Data Streaming Challenge, a global competition focussed on recognising early-stage startups.
The competition, which offers a grand prize of $500,000 and two runner-up prizes of $250,000 each, aims to inspire and help the growth of early-stage startups in the data technology landscape.
Apart from providing startups with scalable, cost-effective, and robust foundation to build their critical data infrastructure, Confluent, aims to work closely with these startups, to further help them grow.
In conversation with edge/ Tim Graczewski, Head of Confluent for Startups, talks about the programme and its main aims. With over 25 years of work experience in technology in Silicon Valley, Graczewsky has held senior leadership roles in alliances, strategy, and business development across companies like Intuit, AWS, and Oracle.
Graczewski is also a two-time venture-backed entrepreneur (Nav and Cake) who has helped raise over $100 million in venture capital to build disruptive startups in fintech and consumer internet.
Leveraging his unique mix of corporate business development leadership and hands-on entrepreneurial experience, Tim came to Confluent in January 2023 to lead and grow the recently launched Confluent for Startups program.
Give us the details of the Confluent for Startups programme and how Confluent helps startups that participate.
Confluent for Startups is designed as an on-ramp for promising early-stage startups (less than five years old) with great Kafka use cases. Eligible startups receive up to one year of Confluent Cloud for free ($20,000 maximum) and access to ongoing technical help and strategic design reviews.
Confluent Cloud provides startups with a robust, scalable, and cost-effective foundation upon which to build their critical data infrastructure and solve their most data-intensive challenges. Doing it the right way, right from the beginning, drives faster development, better insights, and a competitive edge in today’s data-driven business landscape.
Confluent and our venture capital partners recognize the potential of new startups to revolutionize the world with data streaming applications. We’re dedicated to helping them realise their dreams, whether that’s the next hit mobile app or helping the world’s largest enterprises monitor and reduce their carbon footprint.
How did you and your plan decide on creating the programme? What kind of work went on behind the scenes?
Confluent understood that early-stage startups moving to new technology like data streaming require considerable deliberation about how to deploy their limited capital, people, and time.
We designed Confluent for Startups to help early-stage companies ease the transition and leverage all the benefits of data streaming from the start. We wanted to demonstrate a deep commitment to the global startup ecosystem. We benchmarked with similar enterprise startup programs to deliver the most valued benefits package possible.
How does working with startups help Confluent and vice-versa?
Startups benefit from Confluent for Startups in several ways. First, and most obviously, they receive free credits to build and test proof of concepts (POC) without cost. Second, they often receive expert feedback from Confluent’s solution engineers (SE), who have real-world experience designing and implementing sophisticated data streaming pipelines.
This introduction to SEs can help startups “think bigger” about scaling their business and business. Finally, startups can increasingly learn from each other via our growing Confluent for Startups community, which is connected via a dedicated Slack channel.
As for how Confluent benefits from working with startups, we get to see the new and innovative ways they are using data streaming, such as this year’s Data Streaming Startup Challenge finalists, who have leveraged Confluent to power a computational chemistry platform (Atomic Tessellator), an operating system for group transportation (Busie), and the creation of a digital twins platform for events and venues (TwinLabs.ai).
Most large companies have their startup accelerator/programmes. What differentiator does Confluent bring?
Many peer companies in the data infrastructure space (e.g. Databricks, Datadog, Snowflake), also offer free product credits via a startup program. In addition to credits, Confluent for Startups offers bi-weekly technical office hours hosted by a senior member of the Confluent technical marketing team, two one-hour sessions with an SE, and (for those that qualify and apply) a chance to receive a meaningful seed investment from Confluent (up to $500,000) – and pitch to some of the most prestigious venture firms in the world (Benchmark, Index, and Sequoia) – as part of our Data Streaming Startup Challenge.
What are the kinds of startups Confluent is looking at and why?
Confluent for Startups is looking for startups worldwide that meet our basic eligibility criteria (less than five years old and new to Confluent). That said, we are particularly interested in several industries and use cases. For instance, we love to work with startups that started on open-source Kafka and are now looking to migrate to a managed service to benefit from the ease of use, improved performance, and lower total cost of ownership.
Next, we believe that Confluent has a major role in the unfolding artificial intelligence revolution as new learning models move toward real-time data and applications.
Lastly, there are many established use cases that we know we can help young startups with immediately and significantly, such as fraud detection, IoT data integration, and real-time applications for inventory, business analytics, order management, field service, quotes, payments, and more.
What are Confluent’s plans for the program and its startup strategy in general?
Since the program launched in October 2022, we have received almost 500 applications from 50 countries around the world. We plan to continue to grow that footprint in FY’24 by promoting the Confluent brand across the major cloud provider’s startup program and the leading startup accelerators, as well as proactively educating the startup ecosystem on the power of data streaming and the value of Confluent for Startups.
How does Confluent help startups refine their products’ MVPs? How does Confluent direct startups towards building scalable products?
Confluent for Startups is designed to be an easy on-ramp to Confluent Cloud and data streaming for early-stage startups with real-time data needs. It is not a startup accelerator program per se, such as Y-Combinator, Alchemist, or TechStars, that seeks to nurture young startups by providing guidance on product-market fit and improving the narrative of their pitch deck.
To the extent that Confluent for Startups provides coaching and guidance, it occurs at the data architecture level. Each startup program member gets two one-hour sessions with a Confluent Systems Engineer (SE). These sessions allow the Confluent SE to provide feedback on best practices for creating a scalable and robust data architecture that supports the startup’s needs and vision.
The end product is often a data architecture diagram that allows the technical founder to “see” how data will flow through their system.
The $1 million Data Streaming Startup Challenge served a different purpose than our flagship Confluent for Startups program. The Startup Challenge aimed at identifying and promoting early-stage startups that had already adopted Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud and applied it innovatively to a novel use case. As the list of applicants was trimmed from 100 to 12 and then down to 3, we took a more hands-on approach to assisting the startups with their architecture, pitch decks, and introductions to possible partners.
