Neha Narkhede is the co-creator of Apache Kafka and co-founder of Confluent. Confluent went public in 2021 and was acquired by IBM for $11 billion in 2026. Her work established real-time data streaming as essential infrastructure for the Fortune 500. In 2026, Forbes named her one of America's 250 Greatest Living Innovators, crediting her with creating the technology that makes an AI-enabled internet possible, and one of America's 250 Most Successful Living Immigrants. In 2021, she founded Oscilar to bring real-time architecture to financial risk, unifying onboarding, fraud, AML, and credit in a single agentic platform. More than 100 financial institutions run tens of billions of risk decisions each year on Oscilar.