kafka
(4)
DeltaStream
DeltaStream is a Menlo Park-based company building a unified, serverless stream processing platform on top of Apache Flink. Founded in 2021 by Hojjat Jafarpour, the creator of ksqlDB, it lets teams build real-time streaming applications and pipelines using SQL - without wrestling with Flink's operational complexity. Its Fusion platform combines streaming, real-time, and batch analytics into a single serverless experience, integrating with Kafka, Kinesis, Snowflake, Databricks, and Apache Iceberg. The company has raised $25M total, backed by NEA, Galaxy Interactive, and Sanabil.
RisingWave
RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database that lets developers ingest, transform, and serve real-time data using familiar PostgreSQL-compatible SQL instead of specialized stream-processing frameworks. Founded in 2021 by former AWS Redshift engineer Yingjun Wu, the San Francisco company decouples compute from storage in a cloud-native architecture, offers incremental materialized views, and integrates natively with Apache Iceberg to power a streaming lakehouse. Its open-source engine and managed RisingWave Cloud target fraud detection, monitoring, real-time analytics, and increasingly the data infrastructure behind agentic AI.
Artie
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Redpanda Data
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.