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Neha Narkhede: Leading From The Front
Neha Narkhede is an immensely successful Indian-American technology entrepreneur. She is the Co-founder and erstwhile Chief Technology Officer of Confluent. Currently, she is serving on the board of Confluent.
Hailing from Pune in India, Neha Narkhede, is one of America's successful entrepreneurs. She was on the Forbes list of "America's 100 Richest Self-made Women" 2023. The list featured four Indian-origin business leaders: Neha Narkhede, the co-founder of cloud company Confluent; Jayshree Ullal, the president and CEO of computer networking firm Arista Networks; Neerja Sethi, the co-founder of IT firm Syntel; and Indira Nooyi, the former chair and CEO of PepsiCo.
Dream Come True
When Neha's parents bought a computer for her when she was eight-years old, she began to dream about working with technology. In a media conversation, she disclosed that her parents instilled a lot of motivation in her from childhood. She recalls how they instilled in her a belief that she could do anything. Besides, they taught her the value of education and ensured that she received exposure to certain women achievers, whom she looked up to as role models.
After completion of her Bachelors in Computer Science from Savitribhai Phule Pune University, Neha travelled to the US for further studies. She secured her Master's degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US. After her formal education she began working as a member of the technical team at Oracle Corporation in February 2008 and served in the position till February 2010. In Oracle, she was associated with design and implementation of hierarchical faceted search from scratch. Later she joined LinkedIn as a software engineer. She then developed Apache Kafka, which is an open-messaging system created to handle a professional networking site’s data inputs. However, in 2014, she left LinkedIn and co-founded Confluent along with a couple of her colleagues.
Confluent, Inc.
Confluent, Inc. is an American technology firm founded by Jay Kreps, Jun Rao and Neha Narkhede in 2014, with an aim to commercialize an open-source streaming platform, Apache Kafka. This software was created by the same founders while working at LinkedIn in 2008 as a B2B infrastructure company. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, US, Confluent designs and develops data platforms, which help organizations harness business value from stream data. It offers solutions, such as micro-services, Internet of Things (IoT), financial services, fraud detection, customer 360, Azure hybrid streaming and industry solutions, etc. Besides, its offerings include the Confluent platform, an on-premise solution, and the Confluent Cloud, a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS). Also, it is a leading provider of a complete data streaming platform that reinvents Kafka for the data streaming era. The company's cloud-native service offers elastic scalability, guaranteed resiliency, and low latency for processing data in real-time across various applications and systems. Confluent products find a wide range of industry uses, such as to deploy production-ready applications that run across cloud infrastructures and data centres, enabling real-time data analysis. It serves retail, capital market, retail banking, automotive, healthcare and manufacturing industries. It has operations across the US, the UK, the UAE and Spain.
Neha, who is one of America's most successful female entrepreneurs, is worth $680 million as of 2024.
Awards And Honours
Neha has bagged several awards for her stellar performance. She has also received honours and achievements. Some of them are as follows:
• 2017: MIT Technology Review listed her as one of the innovators under 35 years.
• 2018: She was listed as one of America and the World's Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes.
• 2018: She won the Oracle Groundbreaker Award at the Oracle Code One conference in San Francisco.
• 2020: She was at No. 33 on the list of "America's Self-made Women" by Forbes.
• 2022: She was ranked India's youngest Self-made Woman Entrepreneur by IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2022.
Neha's husband Sachin Kulkarni is an engineer. He is the former Meta Platforms engineering executive who co-founded Oscilar. In March 2020, Neha began working part-time as a startup investor and advisor, and began providing advice to several renowned technology-oriented companies, including Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI, Cortex Data, Yugabyte, Metaphor Data, Natalist, and Common Room.
Apart from being a businesswoman, Neha Narkhede is also an accomplished author. In 2017, she published a book titled, Kafka: The Definitive Guide along with Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino. This book narrates all the technologies created by Kafka.
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