Neha Narkhede

Neha Narkhede is a pioneering technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and former CTO of Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Along with Jay Kreps and Jun Rao, she co-created Apache Kafka at LinkedIn in 2011 to solve the company's massive data streaming challenges—a technology now used by over 80% of the Fortune 100. Neha co-founded Confluent in 2014 to commercialize Kafka, serving as CTO until 2020. She earned her Bachelor of Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT) and an MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. Born in Pune, India, Neha was recognized by Forbes as one of America's Self-Made Women in 2020. She currently serves on Confluent's board and has co-founded Oscilar, a risk detection platform.

Confluent is the pioneering data streaming platform company founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka at LinkedIn. The company provides a complete, cloud-native data streaming platform that enables organizations to stream data in real-time across their entire organization. Confluent powers over 75% of the Fortune 500 companies, processing trillions of events daily. The platform enables use cases from real-time fraud detection to personalized customer experiences. Confluent went public on NASDAQ in 2021 and has become the de facto standard for data streaming infrastructure globally.