IBM today (on March 17, 2026) completed the acquisition of Confluent, Inc., for approximately $11 billion in cash.
According to Confluent’s latest financial filings (released in February 2026), the company reported a total of $1.17 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2025.
As this is an all-cash transaction, shareholders will receive $31 per share.
The share price represents a 34% premium over Confluent’s closing stock price just before the deal was announced (which was $23.14).
Confluent brings over 6,500 enterprise clients, including 40% of the Fortune 500, with clients such as BMW, Michelin, and L’Oréal.
Following the completion of the acquisition, Confluent shares have been delisted from Nasdaq and no longer trade publicly.
IBM’s $11 billion acquisition of Confluent transforms its AI strategy by shifting from data at rest to data in motion, providing the real-time nervous system required for autonomous AI agents.
Confluent provides a data streaming platform that acts as the “central nervous system” for an organization, setting data in motion rather than letting it sit static in databases. Founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent offers an enterprise-grade version of this open-source technology to help companies process and react to data as it happens in real time.