Confluent initiated with a Buy at Stifel

Stifel initiated coverage of Confluent with a Buy rating and $40 price target. Confluent’s real-time data streaming platform, built on open-source software Kafka and Flink, plays “a pivotal role in the ongoing secular trend of modernizing data architectures as more companies view data as a core asset,” says the analyst. Kafka has “cemented itself as a defacto standard in over 75% of the Fortune 500 and 150K organizations globally” and the firm believes Confluent is well-positioned to benefit from the enterprise shift towards its managed Kafka and Flink offerings given ease of use, reliability and cost efficiencies, the analyst tells investors.