Neha Narkhede is the co-founder and former chief technology officer of cloud company Confluent.
An Indian American technology entrepreneur, Narkhede now serves as a board member of Confluent.
Narkhede bagged her first job at Oracle as a principal software engineer. Later, she worked as the lead of streams infrastructure at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, she had contributed in developing an open source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking site’s large data input.
In 2011, Narkhede created the Platform Apache Kafka, along with Jun Rao and Jay Kreps.
In 2014, Neha along with Jun Rao and Jay Kreps founded Confluent and started it as a B2B infrastructure company.
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Narkhede was the CTO of Confluent and later also took upon the role of Chief Product Officer until 2020.
In 2017 she co-authored 'Kafka: The Definitive Guide' along with Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino.
Neha Narkhede along with her Confluent team raised $125 million in 2019, bringing its total funding to $206 million in 2019. And in April 2020, the company raised $250 million bringing its total funding to $456 million.
Companies like Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Uber use the Confluent platform for data driven purposes.
In 2017, Forbes named Narkhede as one of America's and the world's top 50 women in Tech. The same year, MIT Technology Review listed her as one of the innovators under 35 and she won the Oracle Groundbreaker Award at the Oracle Code One conference in San Francisco.
In October 2020, Neha was listed 33rd on the list of "America's Self-Made Women" by Forbes.
Nehar Narkhede was born in Maharashtra's Pune and graduated from the University of Pune where she got her Bachelor of Science in Engineering. In 2006, she went abroad for further studies and completed her Masters of Science in Technology from Georgia Tech. At present she is married and lives in Palo Alto, California.
