Who is Neha Narkhede?

Co-founder and former chief technology officer of cloud company Confluent, Neha Narkhede’s journey from Pune to the Silicon

Valley, and from a software engineer to Forbes’ list was quite phenomenal.

And why she is in the news now. With a net worth estimated at 13,380 crore rupees, Narkhede has been ranked eighth in the Leading Wealthy Women 2021 list compiled by Hurun. She can now count herself among the likes of HCL Technologies chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra, who topped the Hurun list for the second year in a row, Falguni Nayar, the promoter of FSN E-Commerce, and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon.

Narkhede was raised in Pune, Maharashtra. By way of her own account to the press, we know the source of her inspiration in her formative years.

So it is no surprise then that she decided to break into the male-dominated tech sector. Narkhede first went to the University of Pune and received her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from SCTR’S Pune Institute of Computer Technology college. In 2006, she left India to get her master’s in computer science from Georgia Tech. After graduating in 2007, she started a job at Oracle.
 

After Oracle, Narkhede worked as a software engineer at LinkedIn, where she was involved in the development of Apache Kafka, an open-source messaging system designed to handle the networking site’s large data input. This would prove to be a pivotal point in her coming entrepreneurial life.
 

It was in 2014 that she and two LinkedIn colleagues left the company to found Confluent.
 

Now, let us know about the company. Headquartered in Mountain View, in California in the United States, Confluent offers organisations an Apache Kafka-based streaming platform that enables them to easily access data in the form of real-time streams.