Conduktor tries to protect “bad data” from company applications

The 12 months was 2020 and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were extremely frustrated with Apache Kafka. The real-time data stream tool simply couldn’t sustain with the engineering needs of the three — especially through the pandemic, when corporations were rushing to use cloud services.

“Many companies have had difficulty scaling their data operations,” Orban told TechCrunch. “And they have struggled to realize the full potential of their data, leaving vast amounts unused or sent to silos.”

After some thought, Orban, Derosiaux and Maarek got here to the conclusion that Kafka, although burdensome, was not an entire failure. This could work, they thought, if it could possibly be improved with some instrumentation.

So they decided to construct the instrumentation.

The trio named the tool Conductorand through the years, it has evolved right into a full-fledged streaming data management platform – one which can capture and filter data according to company policy before it reaches its destination.

Conductor essentially acts as an information gatekeeper, Orban (the startup’s CEO) said, stopping end-applications from being contaminated with “bad data” – corrupted, warped or otherwise incomplete. For example, this could possibly be data for real-time analytics or predictive maintenance.

“Customers are struggling with data explosion, data underutilization and technical hurdles to scaling data in real time,” Orban said. “We are currently working with some of the largest companies in the world because they are the ones feeling these challenges the most.”

Companies can monitor their data streams using Conduktor or share them with third parties through Conduktor Share, which allows organizations to share specific streams externally for data licensing.

The tool runs on a company’s infrastructure and may implement data masking and access controls to be certain that a company’s data practices comply with regulations equivalent to GDPR.

This month, Conduktor closed a $30 million Series B financing round led by RTP Global, with participation from Ansa, M12 (Microsoft’s enterprise fund) and Accel.

Conduktor has competition on this market (as does Immerok), however the startup is growing at a rapid pace, tripling its annual recurring revenue last 12 months. The startup counts DraftKings and Lufthansa as customers and expects to double its 60-person team by 2026.

“As streaming is inevitable in digital innovation, the need for an enterprise data management platform continues to grow,” Orban said, citing a Fortune Business Insights report that estimates the streaming market will grow to $185 billion by 2032.

The fresh money, which is able to bring the New York company’s total capital to $52 million, will go toward overall expansion and product development, Orban said.