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CONDUKTOR, WHICH BRINGS A USER-FRIENDLY GUI TO APACHE KAFKA, NABS $20M

Paul Sawers@psawers
November 22, 2021 5:16 AM
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Conduktor founders Stéphane Maarek (CMO), Stéphane Derosiaux (CTO), and Nicolas
Orban (CEO)

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Confluent‘s blockbuster IPO this year shone a huge spotlight on the value of
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Innovation with location: How Foursquare improves customer business outcomes
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None of this would have been possible without Apache Kafka, the open source data
streaming project that emerged from LinkedIn back in 2011, and upon which
Kafka’s creators eventually built a billion-dollar business via Confluent
starting in 2014. Companies that need continuous access to real-time data in
their applications use Kafka, an event streaming platform built to handle common
business use-cases such as processing ecommerce payments, managing signups,
matching passengers with drivers in ride-hailing apps, harnessing hardware
sensor data, and more.

Some 80% of all Fortune 100 companies use Kafka in some form to store, process,
and connect all their disparate data streams. However, Kafka requires a great
deal of technical nous and resources to fully leverage, which is where Conduktor
is setting out to help with an all-in-one graphical user interface (GUI) that
makes it easier to work with Kafka via a desktop client.

Today, Conduktor announced that it has raised $20 million in a series A round of
funding led by Accel, with participation from Frontline Ventures and Aglaé
Ventures, as it looks to “simplify working with real-time data” on the Apache
Kafka platform.


BRINGING VISIBILITY TO KAFKA

Conduktor is the handiwork of Nicolas Orban (CEO), Stephane Maarek (CMO), and
Stephane Derosiaux (CTO), who founded the company just last year following their
own frustrations working with Kafka and observing similar struggles at other
companies. In its short life so far, Conduktor claims to have attracted some
60,000 users from more than 9,000 companies, including Alcatel-Lucent
Enterprise, DraftKings, and Olo.

In the simplest terms, Conduktor is a full-featured native desktop application
that plugs directly into Apache Kafka to bring visibility to the management of
Kafka clusters, applications, and microservices. It’s ultimately about helping
companies make the most of their existing engineering resources, and minimizing
the need for deep in-house expertise.

“Our core market is enterprise companies that don’t have access to the best
engineers,” Orban told VentureBeat. “The decision to switch to Apache Kafka is
[usually] made at a higher level in a company’s hierarchy, but a long tail of
developers [is] impacted by that choice, and they need help to work with Kafka.”

Above: Conduktor gathers all the required information and metrics from Kafka
clusters and presents them in a single application

Developers can connect Conduktor to any cluster and all the related technologies
associated with Kafka, including schema registry, ksqlDB database, and Kafka
Connect, while it can work across private on-premises infrastructure and
Amazon’s managed Apache Kafka service MSK, Confluent Cloud, among others.

While Confluent might be the poster child of the Kafka movement, as with just
about every other open source project, an ecosystem of companies has emerged to
capitalize on the growing demand for real-time data across the software
spectrum. These include the likes of Aiven, which recently attained a $2 billion
valuation off the back of its suite of managed open source services, which
includes Kafka.

In truth, Confluent itself offers Kafka user interfaces, as do smaller upstarts
such as Lenses, which Celonis acquired just last month. And then there are a
bunch of open source UI tools for Kafka as well. Orban, however, thinks that
Conduktor is “uniquely placed” to thrive in the Kafka UI space, both due to
their collective experience and specific focus on bringing a UI to Kafka.

“Users can find an alternative in the open source world, but those solutions all
lack features, a real vision, and support,” Orban explained. “Those open-source
tools often require some development to be compiled and ready to use. With
Conduktor, you download a ready-to-use tool.”


THE PRICE IS RIGHT

The other paid-for alternatives on the market “come at a much higher price”
according to Orban. Conduktor, meanwhile, ships in three broad flavors — the
free tier has fewer features and is limited to just one cluster, and would be
better suited for testing or proof-of-concept projects in a local development
environment. The professional plan starts at $25 per month for one user (up to a
maximum of ten), and it also unlocks multi-cluster support. The enterprise plan,
which doesn’t have any advertised pricing, includes premium features such as
role-based access control (RBAC), support for plugins and custom extensions, and
support.

It’s also worth noting that Conduktor’s CMO Maarek is among one of the leading
Kafka instructors online, claiming to have taught more than 1 million people
through Udemy over the past five years.

“Conduktor was built to solve real issues we saw businesses were struggling with
when using Apache Kafka in the absence of any supporting tool,” Maarek added.
“The existing options required additional development on top, and none offered a
complete solution with the required vision or support for companies, so we
decided to build it ourselves. ”

With $20 million in the bank, Conduktor reports that it plans to use its fresh
cash injection to build new products with a particular focus on the enterprise
segment, while it will also bolster its remote workforce.

“Since launching, we’ve seen Conduktor really resonate with users, however,
we’ve only scratched the surface,” Maarek continued. “This investment will help
us take the current product even further, and create a new suite of products
that adopt the same mindset.”

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Author
Paul Sawers

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