Confluent (CFLT) S-1/AIPO registration (amended)

As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 16, 2021.

Registration No. 333-256693

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

AMENDMENT NO. 1

TO

FORM S-1

REGISTRATION STATEMENT

UNDER

THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933

CONFLUENT, INC.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)

899 W. Evelyn Avenue

Mountain View, California 94041

(800) 439-3207

(Address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of Registrant’s principal executive offices)

Edward Jay Kreps

Chief Executive Officer

Confluent, Inc.

899 W. Evelyn Avenue

Mountain View, California 94041

(800) 439-3207

(Name, address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of agent for service)

Copies to:

Approximate date of commencement of proposed sale to the public: As soon as practicable after this Registration Statement is declared effective.

If any of the securities being registered on this form are to be offered on a delayed or continuous basis pursuant to Rule 415 under the Securities Act of 1933, check the following box.  ☐

If this form is filed to register additional securities for an offering pursuant to Rule 462(b) under the Securities Act, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

If this form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(c) under the Securities Act, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

If this form is a post-effective amendment filed pursuant to Rule 462(d) under the Securities Act, check the following box and list the Securities Act registration statement number of the earlier effective registration statement for the same offering.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 7(a)(2)(B) of the Securities Act.  ☐

CALCULATION OF REGISTRATION FEE

The Registrant hereby amends this Registration Statement on such date or dates as may be necessary to delay its effective date until the Registrant shall file a further amendment which specifically states that this Registration Statement shall thereafter become effective in accordance with Section 8(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 or until the Registration Statement shall become effective on such date as the Commission, acting pursuant to said Section 8(a), may determine.

The information in this preliminary prospectus is not complete and may be changed. These securities may not be sold until the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is effective. This preliminary prospectus is not an offer to sell nor does it seek an offer to buy these securities in any jurisdiction where the offer or sale is not permitted. PROSPECTUS (Subject to Completion) Issued , 2021. Shares CLASS A COMMON STOCK Confluent, Inc. is offering shares of its Class A common stock. This is our initial public offering, and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $29.00 and $33.00 per share. We have applied to list our Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CFLT”. We have two classes of authorized common stock: Class A common stock and Class B common stock. The rights of the holders of Class A common stock and Class B common stock are identical, except with respect to voting, conversion, and transfer rights. Each share of Class A common stock is entitled to one vote. Each share of Class B common stock is entitled to 10 votes and is convertible at any time into one share of Class A common stock. Outstanding shares of Class B common stock will represent approximately 99.0% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock immediately following this offering, with our directors, executive officers, and principal stockholders beneficially owning shares representing approximately 61.7% of such voting power. We are an “emerging growth company” as defined under the federal securities laws, and as such, we have elected to comply with certain reduced reporting requirements for this prospectus and may elect to do so in future filings. Investing in our Class A common stock involves risks. See “Risk Factors” beginning on page 29. PRICE $ A SHARE Per Share Total Price to Public $ $ Underwriting Discounts and Commissions (1) $ $ Proceeds to Confluent $ $ (1) See the section titled “Underwriters” for additional information regarding compensation payable to the underwriters. The underwriters do not have an option to purchase additional shares of Class A common stock from us at the initial public offering price less the underwriting discount. The Securities and Exchange Commission and state regulators have not approved or disapproved of these securities or determined if this prospectus is truthful or complete. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense. The underwriters expect to deliver the shares of Class A common stock to purchasers on , 2021. Morgan Stanley J.P. Morgan Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC BofA Securities Citigroup Barclays Credit Suisse Deutsche Bank Securities UBS Investment Bank Wells Fargo Securities Cowen D.A. Davidson & Co. JMP Securities KeyBanc Capital Markets Piper Sandler , 2021

OUR MISSION: Set Data in Motion CONFLUENT

Reimagining businesses for a digital-first world by setting Data in Motion FINANCIAL SERVICES Secure transactions, anytime, anywhere, in any currency with real-time payments and instant fraud detection RETAIL AND ECOMMERCE Modern omni-channel shopping, real-time inventory management, and supply chain automation

MANUFACTURING Real-time logistics management, predictive maintenance, and throughput optimization MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT Real-time content management and personalized recommendations

Exceeded 2,500 customers MARCH 2021 Reached over 120 pre-built connectors Confluent Cloud available through the marketplaces of the three leading cloud providers AUGUST 2020 Exceeded 1,000 customers MARCH 2020 50% of all customers on Confluent Cloud SEPTEMBER 2019 General availability of Confluent Server JULY 2019 Exceeded $100 million in ARR 1 APRIL 2019 General availability of ksqlDB MARCH 2018 General availability of Confluent Cloud November 2017 Announced Confluent Platform 1.0 January 2015 Confluent founded byJay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede SEPTEMBER 2014 2019 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2015 2014 Our history of setting Data in Motion

51% Q1 Revenue Growth Year-Over-Year 1 124 % Q1 Confluent Cloud Revenue Growth Year-Over-Year 1 $281M 2,500 + Q1 Remaining Performance Obligations Growth Year-Over-Year of 69% 2 Customers 560 + Customers with $100K+ ARR 2 $ 50B Total Addressable Market 3 All data are as of or for the stated period ended March 31, 2021, unless otherwise indicated. All data are as of or for the stated period ended March 31, 2021, unless otherwise indicated. 1. 2020 Our net and loss 2021, was respectively. $95.0 million and $229.8 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively, and $33.6 million and $44.5 million for the three months ended March 31, 2. See “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations-Key Business Metrics” for additional information. 3. See “Business–Our Market Opportunity.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Through and including                 , 2021 (the 25th day after the date of this prospectus), all dealers effecting transactions in these securities, whether or not participating in this offering, may be required to deliver a prospectus. This is in addition to a dealer’s obligation to deliver a prospectus when acting as an underwriter and with respect to an unsold allotment or subscription.

Neither we nor any of the underwriters has authorized anyone to provide you with any information or to make any representations other than those contained in this prospectus or in any free writing prospectuses we have prepared. Neither we nor any of the underwriters take any responsibility for, and can provide no assurance as to the reliability of, any other information that others may give you. We are offering to sell, and seeking offers to buy, shares of our Class A common stock only in jurisdictions where offers and sales are permitted. The information contained in this prospectus is accurate only as of the date of this prospectus, regardless of the time of delivery of this prospectus or of any sale of our Class A common stock. Our business, financial condition, results of operations, and future growth prospects may have changed since that date.

For investors outside the United States: Neither we nor any of the underwriters have done anything that would permit this offering or possession or distribution of this prospectus in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required, other than in the United States. Persons outside of the United States who come into possession of this prospectus must inform themselves about, and observe any restrictions relating to, the offering of the shares of our Class A common stock and the distribution of this prospectus outside of the United States.

Prospectus Summary CONFLUENT

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Risk Factors CONFLUENT

RISK FACTORS

Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should consider and read carefully all of the risks and uncertainties described below, as well as other information included in this prospectus, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus, before making an investment decision. The risks described below are not the only ones we face. The occurrence of any of the following risks or additional risks and uncertainties not presently known to us or that we currently believe to be immaterial could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, or results of operations. In such case, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline, and you may lose some or all of your original investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Operations

Our recent rapid growth may not be indicative of our future growth. Our rapid growth also makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful.

Our revenue was $65.2 million, $149.8 million, and $236.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively, and $50.9 million and $77.0 million for the three months ended March 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. You should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior period as an indication of our future performance. Even if our revenue continues to increase, we expect that our revenue growth rate will decline in the future as a result of a variety of factors, including the maturation of our business. Overall growth of our revenue depends on a number of factors, including our ability to:

We may not successfully accomplish any of these objectives, and as a result, it is difficult for us to forecast our future results of operations. If the assumptions that we use to plan our business are incorrect or change in reaction to changes in our market, or if we are unable to maintain consistent revenue or revenue growth, our stock price could be volatile, and it may be difficult to achieve and maintain profitability. You should not rely on our revenue for any prior quarterly or annual periods as any indication of our future revenue or revenue growth.

In addition, we expect to continue to expend substantial financial and other resources on:

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These investments may not result in increased revenue in our business. If we are unable to maintain or increase our revenue at a rate sufficient to offset the expected increase in our costs, our business, financial position and results of operations will be harmed, and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability. Additionally, we may encounter unforeseen operating expenses, difficulties, complications, delays, and other unknown factors that may result in losses in future periods. If our revenue does not meet our expectations in future periods, our business, financial position, and results of operations may be harmed.

We have a history of operating losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.

We have experienced net losses in each period since inception. We generated a net loss of $41.4 million, $95.0 million, and $229.8 million for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively, and $33.6 million and $44.5 million for the three months ended March 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. As of March 31, 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $450.6 million. While we have experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, we are not certain whether or when we will obtain a high enough volume of sales to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We also expect our costs and expenses to increase in future periods, which could negatively affect our future results of operations if our revenue does not increase. In particular, we intend to continue to expend significant funds to further develop our offering, including by introducing new offerings and features and functionality, and to expand our sales, marketing, and services teams to drive new customer adoption, expand the use of our offering by existing customers, support international expansion, and implement additional systems and processes to effectively scale operations. We will also face increased compliance costs associated with growth, the planned expansion of our customer base and pipeline, international expansion, and being a public company. In addition, Confluent Cloud operates on public cloud infrastructure provided by third-party vendors, and our costs and gross margins are significantly influenced by the prices we are able to negotiate with these public cloud providers, which in many cases are also our competitors. To the extent we are able to successfully increase the percentage of our revenue attributable to Confluent Cloud, we may incur increased costs related to our public cloud contracts which would negatively impact our gross margins. Our efforts to grow our business may be costlier than we expect, or the rate of our growth in revenue may be slower than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our increased operating expenses. In addition, our efforts and investments to implement systems and processes to scale operations may not be sufficient or may not be appropriately executed. As a result, we may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described herein, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications or delays, and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the value of our business and Class A common stock may significantly decrease.

We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to forecast our future results of operations.

We were founded in 2014. As a result of our limited operating history, our ability to accurately forecast our future results of operations is limited and subject to a number of uncertainties, including our ability to plan for

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and model future growth. Our historical revenue growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. Further, in future periods, our revenue growth could slow or our revenue could decline for a number of reasons, including shifts in our offering and revenue mix, slowing demand for our offering, increasing competition, decreased productivity of our sales and marketing organization, and effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts to acquire new customers, failure to retain existing customers or expand existing subscriptions and usage-based minimum commitments, changing technology, a decrease in the growth of our overall market, or our failure, for any reason, to continue to take advantage of growth opportunities. We have also encountered, and will continue to encounter, risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, such as the risks and uncertainties described in this prospectus. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties and our future revenue growth are incorrect or change, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations, and our business could suffer.

Health epidemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have had, and could in the future have, an adverse impact on our business, operations, and the markets and communities in which we, our partners, and customers operate.

Our business and operations could be adversely affected by health epidemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, impacting the markets and communities in which we, our partners, and customers operate. The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted, and may continue to adversely impact, many aspects of our business. As certain of our customers or potential customers experience downturns or uncertainty in their own business operations and revenue resulting from the spread of COVID-19, they have and may continue to decrease or delay their technology spending, request pricing concessions or payment extensions, or seek renegotiations of their contracts. While historical pricing concessions, payment extensions, and contract renegotiations, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, have not been significant or resulted in a significant decrease in our revenue or delay in revenue recognition, we cannot assure you that future concessions, extensions, or renegotiations that we grant will be similarly insignificant or will not have a significant impact on our revenue, including delays in revenue recognition. The extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our customers and our customers’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult to assess or predict, and we may be unable to accurately forecast our revenues or financial results, especially given that the long term impact of the pandemic remains uncertain. Our results of operations could be materially above or below our forecasts, which could adversely affect our results of operations, disappoint analysts and investors, and/or cause our stock price to decline.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many state, local, and foreign governments have put in place, and others in the future may put in place, quarantines, executive orders, shelter-in-place orders, and similar government orders and restrictions in order to control the spread of the disease. Such orders or restrictions, or the perception that such orders or restrictions could occur, have resulted in business closures, work stoppages, slowdowns and delays, work-from-home policies, travel restrictions, and cancellation or postponement of events, among other effects that could negatively impact productivity and disrupt our operations and those of our partners and customers. Starting in March 2020, we have temporarily required employees to work remotely, suspended non-essential travel by our employees, and required events to be held virtually. We may take further actions that alter our operations as may be required by federal, state, or local authorities, or which we determine are in our best interests. For activities that may be conducted remotely, there is no guarantee that we will be as effective while working remotely. Because our team is dispersed, some employees have experienced, and may continue to experience, less capacity to work due to increased personal obligations (such as childcare, eldercare, or caring for family who become sick), some have become sick themselves and been unable to work, or may be otherwise negatively affected, mentally or physically, by the COVID-19 pandemic and prolonged social distancing. Decreased effectiveness and availability of our team could adversely affect our results due to slow-downs in our sales cycles and recruiting and onboarding efforts, delays in our entry into customer contracts, delays in addressing performance issues, delays in product development, delays and inefficiencies among various operational aspects of our business, including our financial organization, or other decreases in productivity that could seriously harm our business. Furthermore, we postponed, and may decide to further postpone or cancel,

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certain planned investments in our business in response to changes in our business as a result of the spread of COVID-19. For example, during the second and third quarters of 2020, we temporarily reduced the pace of our employee hiring across all functions. In particular, the pause in employee hiring for our sales and marketing organization may negatively impact our growth, business, and revenue. The pause in employee hiring for our research and development organization has caused delays in development and releases of new features and functionality for our offering, which may also harm our competitive positioning as well as our growth, business, and revenue. These actions may also impact our ability to attract and retain customers and our rate of innovation, either of which could harm our business.

The global impact of COVID-19 continues to evolve, and we will continue to monitor the situation closely. The ultimate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic or a similar health epidemic is highly uncertain and subject to change. We do not yet know the full extent of potential delays or impacts on our business, operations, ability to access capital, or the global economy as a whole. While the spread of COVID-19 may be contained or mitigated, there is no guarantee that a future outbreak of this or any other widespread epidemics will not occur, or that the global economy will recover, either of which could harm our business.

We derive substantially all of our revenue from our platform for data in motion. Failure of our offering to satisfy customer demands or achieve continued market acceptance over competitors, including open source alternatives, would harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, and growth prospects.

We derive and expect to continue to derive substantially all of our revenue from sales of, and additional services related to, our platform for data in motion. We have directed, and intend to continue to direct, a significant portion of our financial and operating resources to developing more features and functionality for such offering. Our growth will depend in large part on enabling additional use cases for our customers after they initially adopt our offering, ranging from industry-specific use cases to use cases generated by the network effects of connecting multiple applications within an enterprise. In addition, the success of our business is substantially dependent on the actual and perceived viability, benefits, and advantages of our offering as a preferred platform for data in motion, particularly when compared to open source alternatives developed internally by customers. As such, market adoption of our offering is critical to our continued success. Demand for our offering is affected by a number of factors, including increased market acceptance of our offering by existing customers and potential new customers, effectiveness of our sales and marketing strategy, the extension of our offering to new applications and use cases, the timing of development and release of new offerings by us and our competitors, technological change, and growth or contraction of the market in which we compete. Failure to successfully address these factors, satisfy customer demands, achieve continued market acceptance over competitors, including open source alternatives, and achieve growth in sales of our offering would harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, and growth prospects.

We have historically derived a substantial portion of our revenue from Confluent Platform, and any loss in market acceptance or reduction in sales of Confluent Platform would harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, and growth prospects.

Our business is substantially dependent on Confluent Platform, our enterprise-ready, self-managed software offering. Confluent Platform contributed 89% and 85% of our subscription revenue for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively, and 86% and 80% of our subscription revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. We expect to continue to rely on customer adoption and expansion of Confluent Platform as a component of our future growth. In particular, we are dependent on Confluent Platform serving as a fundamental self-managed, data-in-motion offering to generate wide-ranging use cases for our customers and increase our dollar-based net retention rate with existing customers. If we experience loss in market acceptance, reduced customer renewals or new customer adoption, or limited use case expansion among existing customers of Confluent Platform, our growth, business, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

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We intend to continue investing significantly in Confluent Cloud, and if it fails to achieve market adoption, our growth, business, results of operations, and financial condition could be harmed.

We intend to continue investing significantly in developing and growing Confluent Cloud as a fully-managed, cloud-native service. We have less experience marketing, determining pricing for, and selling Confluent Cloud, and we are still determining how best to market, price, and support adoption of Confluent Cloud. As a result, any shift in our sales strategy focused on customer acquisition for Confluent Cloud could result in near term fluctuations in our financial results as compared to prior periods, particularly if previous Confluent Platform customers shift to Confluent Cloud, given that sales of Confluent Cloud have historically had a lower average price compared to subscriptions to Confluent Platform. Our sales strategy for Confluent Cloud also involves landing customers at low entry points, including starting with our free Confluent Cloud trial and pay-as-you-go, which have no commitments. There can be no assurance that such customers will enter into usage-based minimum commitments with us, expand their existing commitments, or ramp their usage of Confluent Cloud. In addition, there can be no assurance as to the length of time required to attain substantial market adoption of Confluent Cloud, if at all. To expand our potential customer and sales pipeline for Confluent Cloud, we will need to increase brand awareness, cultivate relationships with potential customers in key industries and sectors and rapidly convert the sales pipeline into new customers. To increase market adoption and expand the customer base for Confluent Cloud, we also intend to target the commercial customer segment, comprised of small to medium-sized companies, including early stage companies, as part of our overall sales and marketing strategy for Confluent Cloud. These customers typically demand faster deployment of Confluent Cloud within their organizations and prioritize ease of use. In addition, the sales cycle for these customers is typically shorter, requiring accelerated ramp time of our sales force and higher velocity marketing strategies. If we are unsuccessful in these and our other efforts to drive market adoption of and expand the customer base for Confluent Cloud, or if we do so in a way that is not profitable, fails to compete successfully against our current or future competitors, or fails to adequately differentiate Confluent Cloud from open source alternatives, our growth, business, results of operations, and financial condition could be harmed.

We may not be able to successfully manage our growth, and if we are not able to grow efficiently, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be harmed.

As usage and adoption of our offering grows, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our offering’s capabilities, features, and functionality. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our internal business operations and our services organization to serve our growing customer base. Any failure of or delay in these efforts could result in impaired product performance and reduced customer satisfaction, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower dollar-based net retention rates, or the issuance of service credits or requested refunds, which would hurt our revenue growth and our reputation. Further, any failure in optimizing the costs associated with our third-party cloud services as we scale could negatively impact our gross margins. Our expansion efforts will be expensive and complex, and require the dedication of significant management time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies, vulnerabilities or service disruptions as a result of our efforts to scale our internal infrastructure, which may result in extended outages, loss of customer trust, and harm to our reputation. We cannot be sure that the expansion of and improvements to our internal infrastructure will be effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all, and such failures could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

The markets in which we participate are competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be harmed.

Our platform for data in motion combines and expands upon functionality from numerous traditional product categories, and hence we compete in each of these categories with products from a number of different vendors. Our primary competition, especially on-premise, is internal IT teams that develop data infrastructure software using open source software, including Apache Kafka. Our principal competitors in the cloud are the well-established public cloud providers that compete in all of our markets. These enterprises are developing and have released fully-managed, real-time data ingestion and data streaming products, such as Azure Event Hubs

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(Microsoft Corporation), Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB Streams (AWS), and Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow (Google). On premise, there are a number of vendors with legacy products that have pivoted into this space including TIBCO Streaming, Cloudera Dataflow, Redhat (IBM), AMQ Streams, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Streaming.

We currently offer Confluent Cloud on the public clouds provided by AWS, Azure, and GCP, which are also some of our primary actual and potential competitors. There is risk that one or more of these public cloud providers could use their respective control of their public clouds to embed innovations or privileged interoperating capabilities in competing products, bundle competing products, provide us unfavorable pricing, leverage their public cloud customer relationships to exclude us from opportunities, and treat us and our customers differently with respect to terms and conditions or regulatory requirements compared to similarly situated customers. In addition, if public cloud providers develop a data-in-motion offering that operates across multiple public clouds or on premise, we would face increased competition from these providers. Further, they have the resources to acquire or partner with existing and emerging providers of competing technology and thereby accelerate adoption of those competing technologies. All of the foregoing could make it difficult or impossible for us to provide subscriptions and services that compete favorably with those of the public cloud providers.

With the introduction of new technologies, market entrants, and open source alternatives, including those based on Apache Kafka, we expect that the competitive environment will remain intense going forward. Because Apache Kafka is open source and there are few technological barriers to entry into the open source market, it may be relatively easier for competitors, some of which may have greater resources than we have, to enter our markets and develop data-in-motion alternatives based on Apache Kafka. In addition, the data infrastructure market is large and continues to grow rapidly, and our future success will depend in part on differentiating our product offering from open source alternatives, including Apache Kafka, and core data-in-motion product offerings. If we are unable to sufficiently differentiate our offering from Apache Kafka or other offerings based on or derived from Apache Kafka, we may not be successful in achieving market acceptance of our offering, which would limit our growth and future revenue. Certain existing and prospective customers may have access to certain of our data-in-motion platform functions under free-to-use licenses, which can reduce demand for our offering. Such existing or prospective customers may also have reservations about deploying proprietary software like our offering and may instead opt to use solely open source software based on the perception that this will lower long-term costs and reduce dependence on third-party vendors. In addition, our existing customers have chosen or could in the future choose to develop similar capabilities in-house and strengthen their use of open source software, rather than continue to purchase our offering.

Some of our actual and potential competitors have been acquired by other larger enterprises and have made or may make acquisitions or may enter into partnerships or other strategic relationships that may provide more comprehensive offerings than they individually had offered or achieve greater economies of scale than us. Any trend toward industry consolidation may negatively impact our ability to successfully compete and may impose pressure on us to engage in similar strategic transactions, including acquisitions, which would be costly and may divert management’s attention. In addition, new entrants not currently considered to be competitors may enter the market through acquisitions, partnerships, or strategic relationships. As we look to market and sell our offering and platform capabilities to potential customers with existing solutions, we must convince their internal stakeholders that the capabilities of our offering are superior to their current solutions.

We compete on the basis of a number of factors, including:

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Our competitors vary in size and in the breadth and scope of the products offered. Many of our competitors and potential competitors have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, more established customer relationships and installed customer bases, larger marketing budgets and greater resources than we do. Further, other potential competitors not currently offering competitive solutions may expand their product offerings to compete with our offering and platform capabilities, or our current and potential competitors may establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties that may further enhance their resources and product offerings in our addressable market. Our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards, and customer requirements. An existing competitor or new entrant could introduce new technology that reduces demand for our offering. In addition to product and technology competition, we face pricing competition. Some of our competitors offer their solutions at a lower price, which has resulted in, and may continue to result in, pricing pressures.

For all of these reasons, we may not be able to compete successfully against our current or future competitors, and this competition could result in the failure of our offering to continue to achieve or maintain market acceptance, any of which would harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

The market for our offering may develop more slowly or differently than we expect.

It is difficult to predict customer adoption rates and demand for our offering, the entry of competitive products or the future growth rate and size of the data infrastructure market. The expansion of this market depends on a number of factors, including the cost, performance, and perceived value associated with data infrastructure platforms as an alternative or supplement to legacy systems such as traditional databases, as well as the ability of platforms for data in motion to address heightened data security and privacy concerns. If we have a security incident or third-party cloud service providers experience security incidents, loss of customer data, disruptions in delivery or other similar problems, which is an increasing focus of the public and investors in recent years, the market for products as a whole, including our offering, may be negatively affected. In addition, many of our potential customers have made significant investments in alternative data infrastructure platforms and may be unwilling to invest in new products, such as our offering. If data-in-motion technology does not continue to achieve market acceptance, or there is a reduction in demand caused by a lack of customer acceptance, technological challenges, weakening economic conditions, data security or privacy concerns, governmental regulation, competing technologies and products, decreases in information technology spending or otherwise, the market for our offering might not continue to develop or might develop more slowly than we expect, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

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We expect fluctuations in our financial results, making it difficult to project future results, and if we fail to meet the expectations of securities analysts or investors with respect to our results of operations, our stock price and the value of your investment could decline.

Our results of operations have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance. In addition to the other risks described herein, factors that may affect our results of operations include the following:

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Any of these and other factors, or the cumulative effect of some of these factors, may cause our results of operations to vary significantly. If our quarterly results of operations fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our Class A common stock could decline substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits.

Our revenue mix may result in fluctuations in our results across periods, making it difficult to assess our future growth.

Our revenue mix is varied based on the revenue recognition principles applicable to our offering. We recognize a portion of revenue from sales of subscriptions to Confluent Platform up front when our term-based license is delivered. The remainder, constituting post-contract customer support, maintenance, and upgrades, referred to together as PCS, comprises the substantial majority of the revenue and is recognized ratably over the subscription term. Customers may use Confluent Cloud either without a minimum commitment contract, which we refer to as pay-as-you-go, or on a usage-based minimum commitment contract of at least one year in duration. Pay-as-you-go customers are billed, and revenue from them is recognized, based on usage. Customers with usage-based minimum commitments are typically billed annually in advance, and we recognize revenue from such subscriptions based on usage by the customer. Historically, our Confluent Cloud sales have been individually smaller, with varied usage levels from such customers over time, which may continue as we target the commercial customer segment as part of our sales strategy for Confluent Cloud. As a result, there may be fluctuations in revenue period over period as revenue is dependent on varying patterns of customer consumption as well as timing of sales of Confluent Platform, which can result in larger upfront revenue recognition upon delivery of the term-based licenses. In addition, we may experience fluctuations in margins as a result of high cloud infrastructure costs resulting from increased Confluent Cloud sales. Future fluctuations in our revenue and results across periods, including due to further changes in our revenue mix, may make it difficult to assess our future growth and performance.

Downturns or upturns in our sales may not be immediately reflected in our financial position and results of operations.

We recognize a significant portion of our revenue ratably over the term of Confluent Platform subscriptions. As a result, any decreases in new subscriptions or renewals in any one period may not immediately be fully reflected as a decrease in revenue for that period but would negatively affect our revenue in future quarters, even

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though such a decrease would be reflected in certain of our key metrics as of the end of such period, including RPO. This also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through the sale of additional subscriptions in any period, as revenue is recognized over the term of the subscription. In addition, fluctuations in usage under our usage-based Confluent Cloud offering or monthly subscriptions for our pay-as-you-go offering could affect our revenue on a period-over-period basis. If our quarterly results of operations fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our Class A common stock would decline substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class actions.

Seasonality may cause fluctuations in our sales, results of operations, and remaining performance obligations.

Historically, we have experienced seasonality in RPO and new customer bookings, as we typically sell a higher percentage of subscriptions to new customers and renewal subscriptions with existing customers in the fourth quarter of the year. We believe that this results from the procurement, budgeting and deployment cycles of many of our customers, particularly our enterprise customers. We expect that this seasonality will continue to affect our bookings, RPO, and results of operations in the future and might become more pronounced as we continue to target larger enterprise customers.

If we fail to adapt and respond effectively to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards, changing regulations, or to changing customer needs, requirements, or preferences, our offering may become less competitive.

Our ability to attract new users and customers and increase revenue from existing customers depends in large part on our ability to enhance, improve, and differentiate our existing offering, increase adoption and usage of our offering, and introduce new offerings and capabilities. The market in which we compete is relatively new and subject to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, and changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements, and preferences. The success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to adapt and respond effectively to these changes on a timely basis. Because the market for our offering is relatively new, it is difficult to predict customer adoption, increased customer usage and demand for our offering, the size and growth rate of this market, the entry of competitive products, or the success of existing competitive products. If we were unable to enhance our offering and keep pace with rapid technological change, or if new technologies emerge that are able to deliver competitive products at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently or more securely than our offering, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

To remain competitive, we need to continuously modify and enhance our offering to adapt to changes and innovation in existing and new technologies. We expect that we will need to continue to differentiate our data-in-motion platform capabilities, as well as expand and enhance our platform to support a variety of adjacent use cases. This development effort will require significant engineering, sales, and marketing resources. Any failure to effectively offer solutions for these adjacent use cases could reduce customer demand for our offering. Further, our offering must also integrate with a variety of network, hardware, mobile, cloud, and software platforms and technologies, and we need to continuously modify and enhance our offering to adapt to changes and innovation in these technologies. This development effort may require significant investment in engineering, support, marketing, and sales resources, all of which would affect our business and results of operations. Any failure of our offering to operate effectively with widely adopted, future data infrastructure platforms, applications, and technologies would reduce the demand for our offering. If we are unable to respond to customer demand in a cost-effective manner, our offering may become less marketable and less competitive or obsolete, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

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The competitive position of our offering depends in part on its ability to operate with third-party products and services, including those of our partners, and if we are not successful in maintaining and expanding the compatibility of our offering with such products and services, our business may be harmed.

The competitive position of our offering depends in part on its ability to operate with products and services of third parties, including software companies, software services, and infrastructure, and our offering must be continuously modified and enhanced to adapt to changes in hardware, software, networking, browser, and database technologies. In the future, one or more technology companies, whether our partners or otherwise, may choose not to support the operation of their software, software services, and infrastructure with our offering, or our offering may not support the capabilities needed to operate with such software, software services, and infrastructure. In addition, to the extent that a third party were to develop software or services that compete with ours, that provider may choose not to support our offering. We intend to facilitate the compatibility of our offering with various third-party software, software services, and infrastructure offerings by maintaining and expanding our business and technical relationships. If we are not successful in achieving this goal, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

Unfavorable conditions in our industry or the global economy, or reductions in information technology spending, could limit our ability to grow our business and negatively affect our results of operations.

Our results of operations may vary based on the impact of changes in our industry or the global economy on us or our customers and potential customers. Negative conditions in the general economy both in the United States and abroad, including conditions resulting from changes in gross domestic product growth, financial and credit market fluctuations, international trade relations, political turmoil, natural catastrophes, warfare, and terrorist attacks on the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific region, including Japan, or elsewhere, could cause a decrease in business investments, including spending on information technology, and negatively affect the growth of our business. Competitors, many of whom are larger and have greater financial resources than we do, may respond to challenging market conditions by lowering prices in an attempt to attract our customers. In addition, the increased pace of consolidation in certain industries may result in reduced overall spending on our offering. We cannot predict the timing, strength, or duration of any economic slowdown, instability, or recovery, generally or within any particular industry.

If we are unable to successfully manage the growth of our professional services business and improve our margins from these services, our business, financial condition, and results of operations will be harmed.

Our professional services business, which engages with customers to help them in their strategy, architecture, and adoption of a platform for data in motion, has grown as we have scaled our business. We believe our investment in professional services facilitates the adoption of our offering, especially with larger customers. As a result, our sales efforts have focused on marketing our offering to larger customers, rather than the profitability of our professional services business. If we are unable to successfully manage the growth of this business and improve our profit margin from these services, our business, financial condition, and results of operations will be harmed.

We will face risks associated with the growth of our business with certain heavily regulated industry verticals.

We market and sell our offering to customers in heavily regulated industry verticals, including the banking and financial services industries. As a result, we face additional regulatory scrutiny, risks, and burdens from the governmental entities and agencies which regulate those industries. Entering new heavily regulated verticals and expanding in those verticals in which we are already operating will continue to require significant resources, and there is no guarantee that such efforts will be successful or beneficial to us. If we are unable to successfully penetrate these verticals, maintain our market share in such verticals in which we already operate, or cost-effectively comply with governmental and regulatory requirements applicable to our activities with customers in such verticals, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

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Sales to government entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks.

We sell to U.S. federal, state, and local, as well as foreign and governmental agency customers. Sales to such entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks. Selling to such entities can be highly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Government contracting requirements may change and in doing so restrict our ability to sell into the government sector until we have obtained any required government certifications. Further, achieving and maintaining government certifications, such as U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program certification for Confluent Cloud, may require significant upfront cost, time, and resources. If we do not obtain U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program certification for Confluent Cloud, we will not be able to sell Confluent Cloud to certain federal government and public sector customers as well as private sector customers that require such certification for their intended use cases, which could harm our growth, business, and results of operations. This may also harm our competitive position against larger enterprises whose competitive offerings are certified. Further, there can be no assurance that we will secure commitments or contracts with government entities even following such certifications, which could harm our margins, business, financial condition, and results of operations. Government demand and payment for our offering are affected by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our offering.

Further, governmental entities may demand contract terms that differ from our standard arrangements and are less favorable than terms agreed with private sector customers. Such entities may have statutory, contractual or other legal rights to terminate contracts with us or our partners for convenience or for other reasons. Any such termination may adversely affect our ability to contract with other government customers as well as our reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations. Governments routinely investigate and audit government contractors’ administrative processes, and any unfavorable audit could result in the government refusing to continue buying our subscriptions, a reduction of revenue, or fines or civil or criminal liability if the audit uncovers improper or illegal activities, which could adversely affect our results of operations and reputation.

Our customers also include certain non-U.S. governments, to which government procurement law risks similar to those present in U.S. government contracting also apply, particularly in certain emerging markets where our customer base is less established. In addition, compliance with complex regulations and contracting provisions in a variety of jurisdictions can be expensive and consume significant management resources. In certain jurisdictions, our ability to win business may be constrained by political and other factors unrelated to our competitive position in the market. Each of these difficulties could harm our business and results of operations.

Acquisitions, strategic investments, joint ventures, or alliances could be difficult to identify, pose integration challenges, divert the attention of management, disrupt our business and culture, dilute stockholder value, and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

We have in the past and may in the future seek to acquire or invest in businesses, joint ventures, products and platform capabilities, technologies, or technical know-how that we believe could complement or expand our platform capabilities, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. Further, our anticipated proceeds from this offering increase the likelihood that we will devote resources to exploring larger and more complex acquisitions and investments than we have previously attempted. Any such acquisition or investment may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses in identifying, investigating, and pursuing suitable opportunities, whether or not the transactions are completed, and may result in unforeseen operating difficulties and expenditures. In particular, we may encounter difficulties assimilating or integrating the businesses, technologies, products and platform capabilities, personnel, or operations of any acquired companies, particularly if the key personnel of an acquired company choose not to work for us, their software is not easily adapted to work with our platform, or we have difficulty retaining the customers of any acquired business due to changes in ownership, management or otherwise. These transactions may also disrupt our business, divert our resources, and require significant management attention that would otherwise be

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available for development of our existing business. We may also have difficulty establishing our company values with personnel of acquired companies, which may negatively impact our culture and work environment. Any such transactions that we are able to complete may not result in any synergies or other benefits we had expected to achieve, which could result in impairment charges that could be substantial. In addition, we may not be able to find and identify desirable acquisition targets or business opportunities or be successful in entering into an agreement with any particular strategic partner. These transactions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our results of operations. In addition, if the resulting business from such a transaction fails to meet our expectations, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be adversely affected or we may be exposed to unknown risks or liabilities.

We may require additional capital to support the growth of our business, and this capital might not be available on acceptable terms, if at all.

We have funded our operations since inception primarily through equity financings and sales of our offering. We cannot be certain when or if our operations will generate sufficient cash to fully fund our ongoing operations or the growth of our business. We intend to continue to make investments to support our business, which may require us to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. Additional financing may not be available on terms favorable to us, if at all. If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition. If we incur additional debt, the debt holders would have rights senior to holders of common stock to make claims on our assets, and the terms of any debt could restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our common stock. Furthermore, if we issue additional equity securities, stockholders will experience dilution, and the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our common stock. Because our decision to issue securities in the future will depend on numerous considerations, including factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing, or nature of any future issuances of debt or equity securities. As a result, our stockholders bear the risk of future issuances of debt or equity securities reducing the value of our Class A common stock and diluting their interests.

Risks Related to Cybersecurity and Data Privacy

If we or third parties who we work with experience a security breach, or if the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our information technology, software, services, communications, or data is compromised, our offering may be perceived as not being secure, our reputation may be harmed, demand for our offering may be reduced, proprietary data and information, including source code, could be, and has in the past been, exfiltrated, and we may incur significant liabilities.

Our offering involves the transmission and processing of data, which can include personal information and our or our customers’ or other third parties’ sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information. Security breaches compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this information could result from cyber-attacks, computer malware, viruses, social engineering (including phishing), ransomware, supply chain attacks, credential stuffing, efforts by individuals or groups of hackers and sophisticated organizations, including state-sponsored organizations, errors or malfeasance of our personnel, and security vulnerabilities in the software or systems on which we rely, including third-party systems. Such incidents have become more prevalent in our industry, particularly against cloud services, and may in the future result in the unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate access to, inability to access, disclosure of, or loss of the sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information that we own, process, or control, such as customer information and proprietary data and information, including source code. Additionally, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, certain functional areas of our workforce remain in a remote work environment and outside of our corporate network security protection boundaries, which imposes additional risks to our business, including increased risk of industrial espionage, phishing, and other cybersecurity attacks, and unauthorized access to or dissemination of sensitive, proprietary, or confidential information.

We also rely on third parties to operate our critical business systems and process the sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information that we own, process, or control, including customer information and proprietary data and

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information, including source code. These third parties may not have adequate security measures and could experience a security breach that compromises the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the systems they operate for us or the information they process on our behalf. Cybercrime and hacking techniques are constantly evolving, and we or third parties who we work with may be unable to anticipate attempted security breaches, react in a timely manner, or implement adequate preventative measures, particularly given increasing use of hacking techniques designed to circumvent controls, avoid detection, and remove or obfuscate forensic artifacts.

While we have taken steps designed to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our systems and the sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information that we own, process, or control, our security measures or those of third parties who we work with have been, and could from time to time in the future be, breached or may otherwise not be effective against security threats. For example, beginning in January 2021, a malicious third party gained unauthorized access to a third-party vendor, Codecov, that provides a software code testing tool, potentially affecting more than a thousand of Codecov’s customers, including us, which we refer to as the Codecov Breach. Through our investigations, we have determined that the attackers leveraged a vulnerability in Codecov’s software to gain access to credentials in our development environment, and thereby obtained unauthorized read-only access to, and copied to overseas IP addresses, the private Github repositories containing our source code, references to certain customers, and certain documents containing customer information. Upon learning of the breach, we took action to revoke Codecov’s access and discontinued our use of the Codecov service, rotated all of our credentials identified as exposed by the Codecov compromise to prevent further unauthorized access, analyzed available logs to determine whether there was evidence that the exposed credentials were leveraged to gain access to Confluent systems or systems of our customers, enhanced monitoring of our environment to identify and respond to suspicious activity, and engaged a third-party forensics firm to assist in our investigation, response, and impact mitigation. We have not found any evidence of access to any customer data sent through or stored in our products, nor have we found any evidence that the attackers modified any of our source code or uploaded any malware or any other malicious code to our system. However, the full extent of the impact of this incident on our operations, products, or services is not yet known, and we cannot assure you that there will be no impact in the near term or at all. This incident or any future incidents relating to the Codecov Breach could result in the use of exfiltrated source code to attempt to identify vulnerabilities in our offering, future ransomware or social engineering attacks, reduced market acceptance of our offering, injury to our reputation and brand, legal claims against us, and the diversion of our resources.

In addition, we do not control content that our customers transmit, process, and maintain using our offering. If our customers use our offering for the transmission or storage of personal information and our security measures are or are believed to have been breached, our business may suffer and we could incur significant liability. In addition, our remediation efforts may not be successful.

Any security breach or other incident that results in the compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our systems or the sensitive, proprietary, or confidential information that we own, process, or control, or the perception that one has occurred, including the Codecov incident described above, could result in a loss of customer confidence in the security of our platform and damage to our brand, reduce the demand for our offering, disrupt business operations, result in the exfiltration of proprietary data and information, including source code, require us to spend material resources to investigate or correct the breach and to prevent future security breaches and incidents, expose us to legal liabilities, including litigation, regulatory enforcement and indemnity obligations, claims by our customers or other relevant parties that we have failed to comply with contractual obligations to implement specified security measures, and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. We cannot assure you that the limitations of liability in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from liabilities or damages.

These risks are likely to increase as we continue to grow and process, control, store, and transmit increasingly large amounts of data.

Additionally, we cannot be certain that our insurance coverage will be adequate or otherwise protect us with respect to claims, expenses, fines, penalties, business loss, data loss, litigation, regulatory actions, or other

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impacts arising out of security breaches, or that such coverage will continue to be available on acceptable terms or at all. Any of these results could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Real or perceived errors, failures, bugs, or defects in our offering could adversely affect our reputation and harm our business.

Our offering and platform for data in motion are complex and, like all software, may contain undetected defects or errors. We are continuing to evolve the features and functionality of our data-in-motion platform through updates and enhancements, and as we do so, we may introduce additional defects or errors that may not be detected until after deployment by our customers. In addition, if our platform is not implemented or used correctly or as intended, inadequate performance and disruptions in service may result. Moreover, if we acquire companies or integrate into our platform technologies developed by third parties, we may encounter difficulty in incorporating the newly-obtained technologies into our platform and maintaining the quality standards that are consistent with our reputation. Since our customers use our platform for data in motion for important aspects of their business, any actual or perceived errors, defects, bugs, or other performance problems could damage our customers’ businesses. Any defects or errors in our data-in-motion platform, or the perception of such defects or errors, could result in a loss of, or delay in, market acceptance of our offering, loss of existing or potential customers, and delayed or lost revenue and could damage our reputation and our ability to convince enterprise users of the benefits of our offering.

In addition, errors in our data-in-motion platform could cause system failures, loss of data or other adverse effects for our customers that may assert warranty and other claims for substantial damages against us. Although our agreements with our customers typically contain provisions that seek to limit our exposure to such claims, it is possible that these provisions may not be effective or enforceable under the laws of some jurisdictions. While we seek to insure against these types of claims, our insurance policies may not adequately limit our exposure to such claims. These claims, even if unsuccessful, could be costly and time consuming to defend and could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows.

Interruptions or performance problems associated with our offering may adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Our continued growth depends in part on our ability to provide a consistently reliable platform for data in motion. If we are unable to do so due to vulnerabilities in programming, coding errors, outages caused by our platform’s complexity or scale or due to disruptions in cloud services, or because the systems complexity and scale result in extended outages, we may experience a loss of customers, lost or delayed market acceptance of our offering, delays in payment to us by customers, injury to our reputation and brand, legal claims against us, and the diversion of our resources.

It may become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve the performance of Confluent Cloud as our customer base grows and Confluent Cloud become more complex. We may experience, disruptions, outages, and other performance problems in Confluent Cloud due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, denial of service attacks, issues with third-party cloud hosting providers, or other security-related incidents. In addition, to the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed, and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be adversely affected.

Complying with increasingly stringent laws and requirements relating to privacy, data security, and data protection may be expensive and disruptive to our business, and our failure or perceived failure to comply with them could harm our business.

We, our customers, and third parties who we work with are subject to numerous evolving and increasingly stringent foreign and domestic laws and requirements relating to privacy, data security, and data protection that are increasing the cost and complexity of operating our business.

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Many states have enacted privacy and data security laws. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which took effect on January 1, 2020, gives California residents expanded rights to access and delete their personal information, opt-out of certain personal information sharing, and receive detailed information about how their personal information is used. The CCPA provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for data breaches that is expected to increase data breach litigation. Some observers have noted that the CCPA could mark the beginning of a trend toward more stringent privacy legislation in the United States. California has already adopted a new law, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, or CPRA, that will substantially expand the CCPA effective January 1, 2023. Virginia has similarly enacted a comprehensive privacy law, the Consumer Data Protection Act, which emulates the CCPA and CPRA in many respects, and proposals for comprehensive privacy and data security legislation are advancing in several other states. A patchwork of differing state privacy and data security requirements would increase the cost and complexity of operating our business and increase our exposure to liability.

Foreign laws relating to privacy, data security, and data protection are also undergoing a period of rapid change and have become more stringent in recent years. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, took effect in the European Union, or EU, in May 2018 and has also been transposed into national law in the United Kingdom, or the UK. The GDPR subjects noncompliant companies to fines of up to the greater of 20 million Euros or 4% of their global annual revenues, potential bans on processing of personal information, and private litigation. The GDPR requires companies to give detailed disclosures about how they collect, use, and share personal information; contractually commit to data protection measures in contracts with customers and vendors; maintain adequate data security measures; notify regulators and affected individuals of certain data breaches; meet extensive privacy governance and documentation requirements; and honor individuals’ data protection rights, including their rights to access, correct, and delete their personal information. The GDPR also requires controllers to conduct data protection impact assessments for certain types of processing and requires processors to assist controllers with such assessments, which may be complex and burdensome to conduct. Laws in EU member states and the UK also impose restrictions on direct marketing communications and the use of cookies and similar technologies online, and a new regulation proposed in the EU called the e-Privacy Regulation may make such restrictions more stringent.

European privacy, data security, and data protection laws, including the GDPR, also generally restrict the transfer of personal information from Europe, including the European Economic Area, or EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, to the United States and most other countries unless the parties to the transfer have implemented specific safeguards to protect the transferred personal information. The safeguard on which we have primarily relied for such transfers has been implementation of the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or SCCs, in our relevant data transfer agreements. However, a July 2020 decision of the Court of Justice of the EU has raised questions about the viability of the SCCs as a compliance mechanism for transfers to the United States or most other countries. Authorities in Switzerland have since raised similar questions about the SCCs as a mechanism for complying with Swiss data transfer requirements. The European Commission is in the process of proposing updates to the SCCs and recommendations on supplementary measures. At present, there are few, if any, viable alternatives to the SCCs. In addition, the regulation of data transfers between the EU and UK remains subject to post-Brexit uncertainty. If our efforts to comply with Europe’s highly dynamic cross-border data transfer requirements are not successful, we will face increased risk of substantial fines by European regulators and bans on importing personal information. These evolving requirements may also result in reduced demand for our services from customers subject to the GDPR and require us to increase our data processing capabilities and other operations in Europe at significant expense.

Privacy, data security, and data protection rules are also becoming more stringent beyond Europe. For example, in recent years Brazil and Japan have enacted new and amended laws that seek to align those countries’ data protection rules more closely with the GDPR, and companies that violate them face substantial penalties. Proposals for new comprehensive privacy, data security, and data protection legislation are also advancing in China, India, and Canada. Foreign data localization laws requiring certain data to be stored in the jurisdiction of origin have also become increasingly common.

Like our legal obligations, the demands our customers place on us relating to privacy, data protection, and data security are becoming more stringent. Privacy, data security, and data protection laws including the GDPR

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and CCPA increasingly require companies to impose specific contractual restrictions on their service providers. In addition, customers that use certain of our products to process protected health information may require us to sign business associate agreements that subject us to the privacy and security requirements under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the U.S. Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, as well as state laws that govern the privacy and security of health information. Our customers’ increasing privacy, data security, and data protection standards also increase the cost and complexity of ensuring that the third parties we rely on to operate our business and deliver our services can meet these standards. If we or our vendors are unable to meet our customers’ demands or comply with the increasingly stringent legal or contractual requirements they impose on us relating to privacy, data security, and data protection, including requirements based on updated SCCs, we may face increased legal liability, customer contract terminations and reduced demand for our services.

Finally, we publish privacy policies and other documentation regarding our collection, use, disclosure, and other processing of personal information. Although we endeavor to adhere to these policies and documentation, we and the third parties on which we rely may at times fail to do so or may be perceived to have failed to do so. Such failures could subject us to regulatory enforcement action as well as costly legal claims by affected individuals or our customers.

We strive to comply with applicable privacy, data security, and data protection laws and requirements, but we cannot fully determine the impact that current or future such laws and requirements may have on our business or operations. Such laws or requirements may be inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another, subject to differing interpretations, and courts or regulators may deem our efforts to comply as insufficient. If we or the third parties we rely on to operate our business and deliver our services fail to comply, or are perceived as failing to comply, with our legal or contractual obligations relating to privacy, data security or data protection, or our policies and documentation relating to personal information, we could face governmental enforcement action; litigation with our customers, individuals or others; fines and civil or criminal penalties for us or company officials; obligations to cease offering our services or to substantially modify them in ways that make them less effective in certain jurisdictions; negative publicity and harm to our brand and reputation; and reduced overall demand for our services. Such developments could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Risks Related to Our Sales and Marketing Efforts and Brand

Failure to effectively develop and expand our sales and marketing capabilities or improve the productivity of our sales and marketing organization could harm our ability to expand our potential customer and sales pipeline, increase our customer base, and achieve broader market acceptance of our offering.

Our ability to increase our customer base, achieve broader market adoption and acceptance of our offering, and expand our potential customer and sales pipeline and brand awareness will depend to a significant extent on our ability to expand and improve the productivity of our sales and marketing organization. We plan to continue expanding our direct sales force, both domestically and internationally. We also plan to dedicate significant resources to sales and marketing programs, including to decrease the time required for our sales personnel to achieve desired productivity levels. Historically, newly hired sales personnel have needed several quarters to achieve desired productivity levels. During the second and third quarters of 2020, we temporarily reduced the pace of hiring for our sales and marketing function due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While we have since ramped up hiring, the temporary reduction may delay overall productivity of our sales force, particularly as the newly hired sales personnel take time to achieve desired productivity. Our increased sales and marketing efforts will also involve investing significant financial and other resources, which could result in increased costs and negatively impact margins. Our business and results of operations will be harmed if our sales and marketing efforts fail to successfully expand our potential customer and sales pipeline, including through increasing brand awareness, new customer acquisition, and market adoption of our offering, particularly for Confluent Cloud, or generate significant increases in revenue or result in increases that are smaller than anticipated. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, develop, integrate, and retain talented and effective sales personnel, if our new and existing sales personnel, on the whole, are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time or at all, or if our sales and marketing programs are not effective.

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If we fail to maintain and enhance our brand, including among developers, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our business, financial condition, and results of operations may suffer.

We believe that maintaining and enhancing the Confluent brand, including among developers, is important to support the marketing and sale of our existing and future offerings to new customers and expansion of sales to existing customers. We believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. In particular, we believe that enhancing the Confluent brand will be critical to the growth and market adoption and acceptance of Confluent Cloud due to the presence of open source alternatives, competing large public cloud providers with widespread name recognition, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and other data infrastructure platforms. Software developers, including those within our customers’ IT departments, are often familiar with our underlying technology and value proposition. We rely on their continued adoption of our offering to evangelize on our behalf within their organizations and increase reach and mindshare within the developer community. Actions that we have taken in the past or may take in the future with respect to Apache Kafka or our community license, including the development and growth of our proprietary offering, may be perceived negatively by the developer community and harm our reputation. Successfully maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, our ability to provide reliable products that continue to meet the needs of our customers at competitive prices, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust, our ability to continue to develop new functionality and use cases, our ability to successfully differentiate our offering and its capabilities from competitive products, including open source alternatives, and our ability to increase our reach and mindshare in the developer community. Our brand promotion activities may not generate customer awareness or yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incur in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may suffer.

We have a limited history with pricing models for our offering, and we may need to adjust the pricing terms of our offering, which could have an adverse effect on our revenue and results of operations.

We have limited experience with respect to determining the optimal prices for our offering, and we have changed our pricing model from time to time and expect to continue to do so in the future. For example, in late 2019, we transitioned the primary purchase model for Confluent Cloud from a defined configuration paid annually in advance to a model based on actual monthly usage and committed annual spend. We also expect to continue providing additional features and functionality for our offering as we work toward expanding applications and use cases for our offering, which will require us to continuously evaluate optimal pricing for our offering. If we do not optimally adjust pricing for our offering, our revenue and margins as well as future customer acquisitions may be negatively impacted. As the markets for our offering mature, or as new competitors introduce new products or services that compete with ours, we may be unable to attract new customers at the same price or on the same terms. Moreover, enterprise customers may demand greater price concessions, or we may be unable to increase prices to offset increases in costs, including hosting costs associated with Confluent Cloud. As a result, in the future we may be required to reduce our prices or increase our discounting, which could adversely affect our revenue, gross margin, profitability, financial position, and cash flow.

Sales to enterprise customers involve risks that may not be present or that are present to a lesser extent with respect to sales to smaller organizations.

As of December 31, 2020 and March 31, 2021, we had 513 and 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in ARR, respectively. See the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Business Metrics” for a description of ARR. Sales to enterprise customers and large organizations involve risks that may not be present or that are present to a lesser extent with sales to smaller customers, including the commercial customer segment. These risks include longer sales cycles, more complex customer requirements, substantial upfront sales costs and less predictability in completing some of our sales. For example, enterprise customers may require considerable time to evaluate and test our offering and those of our competitors prior to making a purchase decision and placing an order. A number of factors influence the length and variability of our sales cycle, including the need to educate potential customers about the uses and benefits of our offering, the discretionary nature of purchasing and budget cycles, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the competitive nature of evaluation and purchasing approval processes. Since the process for deployment,

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configuration and management of our offering is complex, we are also often required to invest significant time and other resources to train and familiarize potential customers with our offering. Customers may engage in extensive evaluation, testing, and quality assurance work before making a purchase commitment, which increases our upfront investment in sales, marketing, and deployment efforts, with no guarantee that these customers will make a purchase or increase the scope of their subscriptions. In certain circumstances, an enterprise customer’s decision to use our offering may be an organization-wide decision, and therefore, these types of sales require us to provide greater levels of education regarding the use and benefits of our offering. As a result, the length of our sales cycle, from identification of the opportunity to deal closure, has varied, and may continue to vary, significantly from customer to customer, with sales to large enterprises and organizations typically taking longer to complete. Moreover, large enterprise customers often begin to deploy our offering on a limited basis but nevertheless demand configuration, integration services, and pricing negotiations, which increase our upfront investment in the sales effort with no guarantee that these customers will deploy our offering widely enough across their organization to justify our substantial upfront investment.

Given these factors, it is difficult to predict whether and when a sale will be completed and when revenue from a sale will be recognized due to the variety of ways in which customers may purchase our offering. This may result in lower than expected revenue in any given period, which would have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

The estimates of market opportunity and forecasts of market growth included in this prospectus may prove to be inaccurate, and even if the market in which we compete achieves the forecasted growth, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all.

The estimates of market opportunity and forecasts of market growth included in this prospectus may prove to be inaccurate. Market opportunity estimates and growth forecasts included in this prospectus, including those we have generated ourselves or relating to the expected growth in our market, are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may not prove to be accurate, including due to the risks described in this prospectus. In addition, our market opportunity estimates are derived from four core market segments with different attributes. As a result, our market opportunity may not be comparable to similarly situated companies, which may result in difficulty in evaluating our future growth prospects. Even if the market in which we compete achieves the forecasted growth, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all.

The variables that go into the calculation of our market opportunity are subject to change over time, and there is no guarantee that any particular number or percentage of addressable users or companies covered by our market opportunity estimates will purchase our offering at all or generate any particular level of revenue for us. Any expansion in our market depends on a number of factors, including the cost, performance, and perceived value associated with our platform for data in motion and those of our competitors. Even if the market in which we compete meets the size estimates and growth forecasted in this prospectus, our business could fail to grow at similar rates, if at all. Our growth is subject to many factors, including our success in implementing our business strategy, which is subject to many risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, the forecasts of market growth included in this prospectus should not be taken as indicative of our future growth.

Risks Related to Our Customers

If we are unable to attract new customers or expand our potential customer and sales pipeline, our business, financial condition, and results of operations will be adversely affected.

To increase our revenue, we must continue to generate market acceptance of our brand and attract new customers and expand our potential customer and sales pipeline. Our success will depend to a substantial extent on the widespread adoption of our offering as an alternative to competing solutions, including open source alternatives. In addition, as our market matures, our offering evolves, and competitors introduce lower cost or differentiated products that compete with our offering, our ability to sell our offering could be impaired. Similarly, our sales efforts could be adversely impacted if customers or users within these organizations perceive that features incorporated into competitive products reduce the need for our offering or if they prefer to purchase competing products that are bundled together with other types of products, such as data infrastructure platforms offered by public cloud providers. Our existing sales and marketing strategies for new customer acquisition may

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also be unsuccessful. For example, we offer free, limited evaluation and developer usage of Confluent Platform and free introductory usage of Confluent Cloud to encourage awareness, usage, familiarity, and adoption, and a pay-as-you-go arrangement for Confluent Cloud without minimum usage commitments. If we are unable to successfully convert these free users into paying customers, or convert pay-as-you-go customers into customers with usage-based minimum commitments, we will not realize the intended benefits of this marketing and adoption strategy. As a result of these and other factors, we may be unable to attract new customers or expand our potential customer and sales pipeline, which may have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Our business depends on our existing customers renewing their subscriptions and usage-based minimum commitments, purchasing additional subscriptions and usage-based minimum commitments, and expanding their use of our offering.

Our future success depends in part on our ability to expand our customers’ use of our offering into additional use cases, our customers renewing their subscriptions and usage-based minimum commitments, and our ability to develop our offering for additional use cases and applications. The terms of our subscriptions and usage-based minimum commitments are primarily one year in duration. Our customers have no obligation to renew after the expiration of the applicable term. In order for us to maintain or improve our results of operations, it is important that our customers enter into relationships with us that increase in value over time, and renew and expand their subscriptions with us, including through the use of our offering for additional use cases and applications. Although we seek to increase our revenue through expanded use of our offering by customers in additional use cases, we may not be successful in such efforts. Our dollar-based net retention rate has historically declined or fluctuated, and may further decline or fluctuate, as a result of a number of factors, including loss of one or more customers, the timing and size of any such losses, business strength or weakness of our customers, customer usage of our offering, customer satisfaction with the capabilities of our offering and our level of customer support, our prices, the capabilities and prices of competing products, decisions by customers to use open source alternatives, mergers and acquisitions affecting our customer base, the effects of global economic conditions, or reductions in our customers’ spending on IT solutions or their spending levels generally. In addition, as some customers transition from Confluent Platform to Confluent Cloud, our dollar-based net retention rate may fluctuate or decline, at least in the short term, as those customers replace subscriptions to Confluent Platform with usage-based minimum commitments. Historically, some of our customers have elected not to renew their subscriptions with us for a variety of reasons, including as a result of competing products, internally developed or managed solutions, including those based on Apache Kafka or other open source alternatives, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors may also be exacerbated if our customer base of larger enterprises continues to grow, which may require increasingly sophisticated and costly sales efforts, and if large enterprises further develop internal capabilities. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions and/or usage-based minimum commitments, expand their use of our offering, and purchase additional products from us, our revenue may decline and our business, financial condition, and results of operations may be harmed.

If we or any of our partners fail to offer high-quality support, our reputation could suffer.

Our customers rely on our or our channel partners’ support personnel to resolve issues and realize the full benefits that our offering provides. High-quality support is also important for the continuation and expansion of our relationships with existing customers. The importance of these support functions will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. In certain cases, such as when we sell our offering through channel partners, our partners may be responsible for providing support and support personnel for our customers. We often have limited to no control or visibility in such cases. If we or our partners do not help our customers quickly resolve issues and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to maintain and expand our sales to existing and new customers could suffer, and our reputation with existing or potential customers could suffer.

The loss of one or more of our key customers, or a failure to renew our subscription agreements with one or more of our key customers, could negatively affect our ability to market our offering.

We rely on our reputation and recommendations from key customers in order to promote our offering. The loss of any of our key customers, or a failure of some of them to renew, could have a significant impact on our

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revenue, reputation, and our ability to obtain new customers. In addition, acquisitions of our customers could lead to cancellation of our subscriptions and usage-based commitments with those customers or by the acquiring companies, thereby reducing the number of our existing and potential customers. Acquisitions of our partners could also result in a decrease in the number of our current and potential customers, as our partners may no longer facilitate the adoption of our offering.

Incorrect implementation or use of our offering, or our customers’ failure to update Confluent Platform, could result in customer dissatisfaction and negatively affect our reputation, business, operations, financial results, and growth prospects.

Our offering is often operated in large scale, complex IT environments. Our customers and some partners require education and experience in the proper use of and the benefits that can be derived from our offering to maximize their potential. If users of our offering do not implement, use, or update our offering correctly or as intended, then inadequate performance and/or security vulnerabilities may result. Because our customers rely on our offering to manage a wide range of operations, the incorrect implementation or use of our offering, or our customers’ failure to update Confluent Platform, or our failure to train customers on how to use our offering productively may result in customer dissatisfaction, and negative publicity, and may adversely affect our reputation and brand. Our failure to effectively provide education and implementation services to our customers could result in lost opportunities for follow-on sales to these customers and decrease subscriptions by new customers, which would adversely affect our business and growth prospects.

Indemnity provisions in various agreements to which we are party potentially expose us to substantial liability for infringement, misappropriation, or other violation of intellectual property rights, data protection, and other losses.

Certain of our agreements with our customers and other third parties include indemnification provisions under which we agree to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of infringement, misappropriation or other violation of intellectual property rights, data protection, compliance with laws, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from our software, services, platform, our acts or omissions under such agreements, or other contractual obligations. From time to time, our customers and other third parties have requested, and may in the future request, us to indemnify them for such claims or liabilities. In certain circumstances, our agreements provide for uncapped indemnity liability for certain intellectual property infringement claims. Large indemnity payments could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Although we attempt to contractually limit our liability with respect to such indemnity obligations, we are not always successful and may still incur substantial liability related to them, and we may be required to cease use of or modify certain functions of our offering as a result of any such claims. Any dispute with a customer or other third party with respect to such obligations could have adverse effects on our relationship with such customer or other third party and other existing or prospective customers, reduce demand for our subscriptions and services and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, although we carry general liability insurance, our insurance may not be adequate to indemnify us for all liability that may be imposed or otherwise protect us from liabilities or damages with respect to claims alleging unauthorized access to or disclosure of customer data, and any such coverage may not continue to be available to us on acceptable terms or at all.

We typically provide service-level commitments under our customer agreements. If we fail to meet these commitments, we could face customer terminations, a reduction in renewals, and damage to our reputation, which would lower our revenue and harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Our agreements with our customers contain uptime and response service-level commitments. If we fail to meet these commitments, we could face customer terminations or a reduction in renewals, which could significantly affect both our current and future revenue. Any service-level commitment failures could also damage our reputation. In addition, if we are unable to meet the stated uptime requirements described in our agreements, we may be contractually obligated to provide these customers with service credits, which could significantly affect our revenue in the periods in which the failure occurs and the credits are applied. Any of these outcomes or failures could also adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

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Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property

We use third-party open source software in our offering, which could negatively affect our ability to sell our offering or subject us to litigation or other actions.

We use third-party open source software in our offering, most significantly Apache Kafka, and we expect to continue to incorporate such open source software in our offering in the future. Many open source software licenses, including the Apache License, Version 2.0, state that any work of authorship licensed under it may be reproduced and distributed provided that certain conditions are met. However, we may be subject to suits by parties claiming ownership rights in what we believe to be permissively licensed open source software or claiming non-compliance with the applicable open source licensing terms. It is possible that a court would hold the Apache License, Version 2.0 to be unenforceable or that someone could assert a claim for proprietary rights in a program developed and distributed under it. Any ruling by a court that this license is not enforceable, or that open source components of our offering may not be reproduced or distributed, may negatively impact our distribution or development of all or a portion of our offering.

In addition, some open source licenses require end-users who distribute or make available across a network software and services that include open source software to make available all or part of such software, which in some circumstances could include valuable proprietary code. While we employ practices designed to monitor our compliance with the licenses of third-party open source software and protect our valuable proprietary source code, we may inadvertently use third-party open source software in a manner that is inconsistent with our applicable policies, or that exposes us to claims of non-compliance with the terms of their licenses, including claims of intellectual property rights infringement or breach of contract. Furthermore, there exists today an increasing number of types of open source software licenses, almost none of which have been tested in courts of law to provide guidance of their proper legal interpretations. From time to time, there have been claims challenging the ownership rights in open source software against companies that incorporate it into their offerings, and the licensors of such open source software provide no warranties or indemnities with respect to such claims. As a result, we and our customers could be subject to lawsuits by parties claiming ownership rights in what we believe to be permissively licensed open source software. Resulting litigation could be costly for us to defend and harm our reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations. If our activities were determined to be out of compliance with the terms of any applicable “copyleft” open source licenses, we may be required to publicly release certain portions of our proprietary source code for no cost, we could face an injunction for our offering, and we could also be required to expend substantial time and resources to re-engineer some or all of our software.

We also regularly contribute source code under open source licenses and have made some of our own software available under open source or source-available licenses, and we include third-party open source software in our offering. Because the source code for any software we contribute to open source projects, including Apache Kafka, or distribute under open source or source-available licenses is publicly available, our ability to protect our intellectual property rights with respect to such source code may be limited or lost entirely, and we may be limited in our ability to prevent our competitors or others from using such contributed source code. While we have policies in place that govern such submissions, there is a risk that employees may submit proprietary source code or source code embodying our intellectual property, in either case, not intended to be distributed in such a manner, to such open source projects. In addition, the use of third-party open source software may expose us to greater risks than the use of third-party commercial software because open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or controls on the functionality or origin of the software. Use of open source software may also present additional security risks because the public availability of such software may publicize vulnerabilities or otherwise make it easier for hackers and other third parties to determine how to compromise our platform. Any of the foregoing could be harmful to our business, results of operations or financial condition, and could help our competitors develop products and services that are similar to or better than ours.

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Our offering has evolved from Apache Kafka and other open source software, which are widely available, and therefore, we do not own the exclusive rights to the use of Apache Kafka and other open source software, nor are we able to control the evolution, enhancement, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and other open source software.

The technology underlying our offering has evolved from certain open source software, such as Apache Kafka, and as a result we cannot exclude other companies from adopting and modifying certain common elements of our software and that of such open source software. With open source software, competitors can also develop competing products without the amount of overhead and lead time required for traditional proprietary software development. In addition, if competing products are also based on or compatible with Apache Kafka, existing customers may also be able to easily transfer their applications to competing products. Competitors with greater resources than ours or members of the Apache Kafka community may create similar or superior offerings, or modify Apache Kafka with different, superior features, and could make such products available to the public free of charge. Our competitors or members of the open source community may also develop a new open source project or a closed-source proprietary product that is similar to and superior to Apache Kafka in terms of feature or performance, in turn gaining popularity or replacing Apache Kafka as the new standard for data-in-motion technology among developers and other users. As a result, the future of Apache Kafka and other open source software could change dramatically and such change in trajectory, use and acceptance in the marketplace and resulting competitive pressure could result in reductions in the prices we charge for our offering, loss of market share, and adversely affect our business operations and financial outlook. Additionally, the development and growth of our proprietary offering may result in the perception within the open source community of a diminution of our commitment to Apache Kafka and other open source platforms. Such perceptions may negatively affect our reputation within the developer community, which may adversely affect market acceptance and future sales of our offering.

Any failure to obtain, maintain, protect, or enforce our intellectual property and proprietary rights could impair our ability to protect our proprietary technology and our brand.

Our success depends to a significant degree on our ability to obtain, maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, know-how, and our brand. We rely on a combination of trademarks, trade secret laws, patents, copyrights, service marks, contractual restrictions, and other intellectual property laws and confidentiality procedures to establish and protect our proprietary rights. However, the steps we take to obtain, maintain, protect, and enforce our intellectual property rights may be inadequate. We will not be able to protect our intellectual property rights if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property rights. If we fail to protect our intellectual property rights adequately, our competitors may gain access to our proprietary technology and develop and commercialize substantially identical products, services, or technologies. In addition, defending our intellectual property rights might entail significant expense. Any patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights that we have or may obtain may be challenged or circumvented by others or invalidated or held unenforceable through administrative process, including re-examination, inter partes review, interference and derivation proceedings, and equivalent proceedings in foreign jurisdictions (e.g., opposition proceedings), or litigation.

We have a limited patent portfolio and no patent applications. Even if we continue to seek patent protection in the future, we may be unable to obtain or maintain patent protection for our technology. In addition, our issued patents or any patents issued from future patent applications or licensed to us in the future may not provide us with competitive advantages or may be successfully challenged by third parties. There may be issued patents of which we are not aware, held by third parties that, if found to be valid and enforceable, could be alleged to be infringed by our current or future technologies or offerings. There also may be pending patent applications of which we are not aware that may result in issued patents, which could be alleged to be infringed by our current or future technologies or offerings. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability, and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our offering and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products that compete with ours. Patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret protection may not be available to us in every country in which our offering is available.

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The value of our intellectual property could diminish if others assert rights in or ownership of our trademarks and other intellectual property rights, or trademarks that are similar to our trademarks. We may be unable to successfully resolve these types of conflicts to our satisfaction. In some cases, litigation or other actions may be necessary to protect or enforce our trademarks and other intellectual property rights. Furthermore, third parties may assert intellectual property claims against us, and we may be subject to liability, required to enter into costly license agreements, or required to rebrand our offering or prevented from selling our offering if third parties successfully oppose or challenge our trademarks or successfully claim that we infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate their trademarks or other intellectual property rights. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States, and mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be inadequate. As we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our offering and proprietary information will likely increase. Moreover, policing unauthorized use of our technologies, trade secrets, and intellectual property may be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly in foreign countries where the laws may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States and where mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be weak. Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may be unable to prevent third parties from infringing upon, misappropriating or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights.

We enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and enter into confidentiality agreements with other third parties, including suppliers and other partners. However, we cannot guarantee that we have entered into such agreements with each party that has or may have had access to our proprietary information, know-how, and trade secrets. Moreover, no assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to, distribution, use, misuse, misappropriation, reverse engineering, or disclosure of our proprietary information, know-how, and trade secrets. Further, these agreements may not prevent our competitors from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our offering and platform capabilities. These agreements may be breached, and we may not have adequate remedies for any such breach. Additionally, as a result of the Codecov Breach, certain of our proprietary data and information, including source code, was exfiltrated. This and any future similar incidents may lead to unauthorized use of our intellectual property rights by third parties. Third parties with access to our exfiltrated source code may also glean insights into our proprietary architecture by examining structural elements of the source code. Due to the nature of this incident, our ability to enforce our rights against such unauthorized users may be limited or not possible.

In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect such rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time-consuming, and distracting to management, and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Further, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights, and if such defenses, counterclaims, or countersuits are successful, we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could delay further sales or the implementation of our offering and platform capabilities, impair the functionality of our offering and platform capabilities, delay introductions of new solutions, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our offering, or injure our reputation.

We may become subject to intellectual property disputes, which are costly and may subject us to significant liability and increased costs of doing business.

We may become subject to intellectual property disputes. Our success depends, in part, on our ability to develop and commercialize our offering without infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating the intellectual property rights of third parties. However, we may not be aware that our offering is infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating third-party intellectual property rights, and such third parties may bring claims alleging such infringement, misappropriation or violation. Lawsuits are time-consuming and expensive to

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resolve, and they divert management’s time and attention. The software industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual and proprietary rights. Companies in the software industry are often required to defend against litigation claims based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation or other violations of intellectual property rights. Our technologies may not be able to withstand any third-party claims against their use. In addition, many companies have the capability to dedicate substantially greater resources to enforce their intellectual property rights and to defend claims that may be brought against them. We do not currently have a large patent portfolio, which could prevent us from deterring patent infringement claims through our own patent portfolio, and our competitors and others may now and in the future have significantly larger and more mature patent portfolios than we have. Any litigation may also involve patent holding companies or other adverse patent owners that have no relevant product revenue, and therefore, our patent applications may provide little or no deterrence as we would not be able to assert them against such entities or individuals. If a third party is able to obtain an injunction preventing us from accessing such third-party intellectual property rights, or if we cannot license or develop alternative technology for any infringing aspect of our business, we would be forced to limit or stop sales of our offering or cease business activities related to such intellectual property. Although we carry general liability insurance, our insurance may not cover potential claims of this type or may not be adequate to indemnify us for all liability that may be imposed. We cannot predict the outcome of lawsuits and cannot ensure that the results of any such actions will not have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. Any intellectual property litigation to which we might become a party, or for which we are required to provide indemnification, may require us to do one or more of the following:

Even if the claims do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor, these claims, and the time and resources necessary to resolve them, could divert the resources of our management and harm our business and results of operations. Moreover, there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments, and if securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a substantial adverse effect on the price of our Class A common stock. We expect that the occurrence of infringement claims is likely to grow as the market for our platform for data in motion and our offering grows. Accordingly, our exposure to damages resulting from infringement claims could increase, and this could further exhaust our financial and management resources.

Risks Related to Our Dependence on Third Parties

We rely on third-party providers of cloud-based infrastructure to host Confluent Cloud. Any failure to adapt our offering to evolving network architecture technology, disruption in the operations of these third-party providers, limitations on capacity or use of features, or interference with our use could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

We outsource all of the infrastructure relating to Confluent Cloud to AWS, Azure, and GCP, as selected by our customers. Customers of our Confluent Cloud service need to be able to access our service at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance, and we provide them with service-level commitments with respect to uptime. Our Confluent Cloud service depends on the ability of the cloud infrastructure hosted by these third-party providers to allow for our customers’ configuration, architecture, features, and interconnection specifications, as well as secure the information stored in these virtual data centers, which is transmitted through third-party internet service providers. Any limitation on the capacity of our third-party hosting providers, including due to technical failures, natural disasters, fraud, or security attacks, could impede our ability to

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onboard new customers or expand the usage of our existing customers, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, our third-party cloud service providers run their own platforms that we access, and we are, therefore, vulnerable to service interruptions at these providers. Any incident affecting our providers’ infrastructure, including any incident that may be caused by cyber-attacks, natural disasters, fire, flood, severe storm, earthquake, power loss, telecommunications failures, terrorist or other attacks, and other similar events beyond our control could negatively affect our Confluent Cloud service. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these performance problems within a period of time acceptable to our customers. A prolonged service disruption affecting our service for any of the foregoing reasons would negatively impact our ability to serve our customers and could damage our reputation with current and potential customers, expose us to liability, cause us to lose customers or otherwise harm our business. We may also incur significant costs for using alternative equipment or taking other actions in preparation for, or in reaction to, events that damage the third-party cloud services we use. Features and functionality for Confluent Cloud may also not be available on the same basis or at all on one or more infrastructure platforms, which may hinder adoption of Confluent Cloud, reduce usage, and harm our brand, business, and results of operations. Any of the above circumstances or events may harm our reputation, cause customers to stop using our products, impair our ability to increase revenue from existing customers, impair our ability to grow our customer base, and otherwise harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

In the event that our service agreements with our third-party cloud service providers are terminated or amended, or there is a lapse of service, elimination of services or features that we utilize, interruption of internet service provider connectivity or damage to such facilities, access to Confluent Cloud could be interrupted and result in significant delays and additional expense as we arrange or create new facilities and services or re-architect our Confluent Cloud service for deployment on a different cloud infrastructure service provider, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. To the extent that we do not effectively anticipate capacity demands, upgrade our systems as needed, and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business and results of operations may be adversely affected.

If we are unable to develop and maintain successful relationships with partners to distribute our products and generate sales opportunities, our business, results of operations, and financial condition could be harmed.

We have established, and intend to continue seeking opportunities for, partnership arrangements with certain channel partners to distribute our products and generate sales opportunities, particularly internationally. We believe that continued growth in our business is dependent upon identifying, developing, and maintaining strategic relationships with our existing and potential channel partners that can drive revenue growth in more geographies and market segments, particularly for government customers, and provide additional features and functionality to our customers. Our agreements with our existing channel partners are non-exclusive, meaning our channel partners may offer customers the products of several different companies, including products that compete with ours. They may also cease marketing our products with limited or no notice and with little or no penalty. We expect that any additional channel partners we identify and develop will be similarly non-exclusive and not bound by any requirement to continue to market our products. As our channel partnerships come to an end or terminate, we may be unable to renew or replace them on comparable terms, or at all. In addition, winding down channel partnerships can result in additional costs, litigation, and negative publicity. If we fail to identify additional channel partners in a timely and cost-effective manner, or at all, or are unable to assist our current and future channel partners in independently distributing and deploying our products, our business, results of operations, and financial condition could be harmed. When we enter into channel partnerships, our partners may be required to undertake some portion of sales, marketing, implementation services, engineering services, support services, or software configuration that we would otherwise provide, including due to regulatory constraints. In such cases, our partner may be less successful than we would have otherwise been absent the arrangement and our ability to influence, or have visibility into, the sales, marketing, and related efforts of our partners may be limited. Further, if our channel partners do not effectively market and sell our products, or fail to meet the needs of our customers, our reputation and ability to grow our business may also be harmed.

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We depend and rely on SaaS technologies from third parties to operate our business, and interruptions or performance problems with these technologies may adversely affect our business and results of operations.

We rely on hosted SaaS applications from third parties in order to operate critical functions of our business, including enterprise resource planning, order management, billing, project management, human resources, technical support, and accounting and other operational activities. If these services become unavailable due to extended outages, interruptions or because they are no longer available on commercially reasonable terms, our expenses could increase, our ability to manage finances could be interrupted and our processes for managing sales of our offering and supporting our customers could be impaired until equivalent services, if available, are identified, obtained, and implemented, all of which could adversely affect our business and results of operations.

Risks Related to Our Employees and Culture

We rely on the performance of highly skilled personnel, including senior management and our engineering, services, sales and technology professionals. If we are unable to retain or motivate key personnel or hire, retain and motivate qualified personnel, our business will be harmed.

We believe our success has depended, and continues to depend, on the efforts and talents of our senior management team, particularly Jay Kreps, our Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, as well as our other key employees in the areas of research and development and sales and marketing.

From time to time, there may be changes in our executive management team or other key employees resulting from the hiring or departure of these personnel. Our executive officers and certain other key employees are employed on an at-will basis, which means that these personnel could terminate their employment with us at any time. The loss of one or more of our executive officers, or the failure by our executive team to effectively work with our employees and lead our company, could harm our business. We also are dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers because of the complexity of our offering.

In addition, to execute our growth plan, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. Competition for these personnel is intense, especially for engineers experienced in designing and developing cloud-based infrastructure products and for experienced sales professionals. If we are unable to attract such personnel at appropriate locations, we may need to hire in new regions, which may add to the complexity and costs of our business operations. From time to time, we have experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we have. If we hire employees from competitors or other companies, their former employers may attempt to assert that these employees or we have breached certain legal obligations, resulting in a diversion of our time and resources. In addition, prospective and existing employees often consider the value of the equity awards they receive in connection with their employment. If the perceived value of our equity awards declines, experiences significant volatility, or increases such that prospective employees believe there is limited upside to the value of our equity awards, it may adversely affect our ability to recruit and retain key employees. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business and future growth prospects would be harmed.

Our company values have contributed to our success. If we cannot maintain these values as we grow, we could lose certain benefits we derive from them, and our employee turnover could increase, which could harm our business.

We believe that our company values have been and will continue to be a key contributor to our success. We have rapidly increased our workforce across all departments, and we expect to continue to hire aggressively across our business. Our anticipated headcount growth, combined with our transition from a privately-held to a publicly-traded company, may result in changes to certain employees’ adherence to our core company values. If we do not continue to maintain our adherence to our company values as we grow, including through any future acquisitions or other strategic transactions, we may experience increased turnover in a portion of our current employee base and may not continue to be successful in hiring future employees. Moreover, following this

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offering, many of our employees may be eligible to receive significant proceeds from the sale of Class A common stock in the public markets. This may lead to higher employee attrition rates. If we do not replace departing employees on a timely basis, our business and growth may be harmed.

Risks Related to Our International Operations

If we are not successful in expanding our operations and customer base internationally, our business and results of operations could be negatively affected.

A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. Customers outside the United States generated 34% and 36% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020 and the three months ended March 31, 2021, respectively. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to expand in international markets, but there is no guarantee that such efforts will have the desired effect. For example, we anticipate that we will need to establish relationships with new channel partners in order to expand into certain countries, and if we fail to identify, establish, and maintain such relationships, we may be unable to execute on our expansion plans. As of March 31, 2021, approximately 29% of our full-time employees were located outside of the United States, with 10% of our full-time employees located in the UK. We expect that our international activities will continue to grow for the foreseeable future as we continue to pursue opportunities in existing and new international markets, which will require significant dedication of management attention and financial resources. If we invest substantial time and resources to further expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business and results of operations will suffer.

We are subject to risks inherent in international operations that can harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Our current and future international business and operations involve a variety of risks, including:

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The occurrence of any one of these risks could harm our international business and, consequently, our results of operations. Additionally, operating in international markets requires significant management attention and financial resources. We cannot be certain that the investment and additional resources required to operate in other countries will produce desired levels of revenue or profitability.

Legal, political, and economic uncertainty surrounding the exit of the UK from the EU may be a source of instability in international markets, create significant currency fluctuations, adversely affect our operations in the UK and pose additional risks to our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

Following the result of a referendum in 2016, the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, commonly referred to as Brexit. Following the end of the transitional period on December 31, 2020, during which period EU rules continued to apply in the UK, an agreement outlining the future trading relationship between the EU and the UK, referred to as the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, became effective. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement does not cover financial services in any meaningful way and, while it has been approved by the UK Parliament, remains subject to approval by the EU Parliament. The agreement will apply provisionally until April 30, 2021. Notwithstanding the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, uncertainty concerning the UK’s legal, political, and economic relationship with the EU may continue to be a source of instability in the international markets, create significant currency fluctuations, or otherwise adversely affect trading agreements or similar cross-border co-operation arrangements (whether economic, tax, fiscal, legal, regulatory, or otherwise).

These developments have had and may continue to have a significant adverse effect on global economic conditions and the stability of global financial markets, and could significantly reduce global market liquidity and limit the ability of key market participants to operate in certain financial markets. In particular, it could also lead to a period of considerable uncertainty in relation to the UK financial and banking markets, as well as on the regulatory process in Europe. Asset valuations, currency exchange rates, and credit ratings may also be subject to increased market volatility. The long-term effects of Brexit will depend on any further agreements, in particular on financial services, (or lack thereof) between the UK and the EU.

Such a withdrawal from the EU is unprecedented, and it is unclear how the UK’s access to the European single market for goods, capital, services, and labor within the EU, or single market, and the wider commercial, legal, and regulatory environment, will impact our UK operations and customers. Our UK operations service customers in the UK as well as in other countries in the EU and EEA, and these operations could be disrupted by Brexit.

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We may also face new regulatory costs and challenges as a result of Brexit that could have an adverse effect on our operations. For example, the UK could lose the benefits of global trade agreements negotiated by the EU on behalf of its members, which, if not replicated by the UK, may result in increased trade barriers. There may continue to be economic uncertainty surrounding the consequences of Brexit that adversely impact customer confidence resulting in customers reducing their spending budgets on our offering, which could harm our business.

We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates, which could negatively affect our results of operations.

Our subscriptions and services are billed in U.S. dollars, and therefore, our revenue is not subject to foreign currency risk. However, a strengthening of the U.S. dollar could increase the real cost of our offering to our customers outside of the United States, which could adversely affect our results of operations. In addition, an increasing portion of our operating expenses are incurred outside the United States. These operating expenses are denominated in foreign currencies and are subject to fluctuations due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates. While we do not currently hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, if our foreign currency risk increases in the future and we are not able to successfully hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, our results of operations could be adversely affected.

Risks Related to Our Tax, Legal, and Regulatory Environment

We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate the controls.

Our offering is subject to U.S. export controls, including the Export Administration Regulations, and we incorporate encryption technology into our offering. Our offering and the underlying technology may be exported outside of the United States only with the required export authorizations, including by license, a license exception, or other appropriate government authorizations, including the filing of an encryption classification request or self-classification report, as applicable.

Furthermore, we are required to comply with economic and trade sanctions laws and regulations administered by governments where our offering is provided, including the U.S. government (including regulations administered and enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Department of State). These economic and trade sanctions prohibit or restrict the shipment of most products and services to embargoed jurisdictions or sanctioned parties, unless required export authorizations are obtained. Obtaining the necessary export license or other authorization for a particular sale may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities.

While we have taken certain precautions to prevent our offering from being provided in violation of export control and sanctions laws, and are in the process of enhancing our policies and procedures relating to export control and sanctions compliance, our products may have been in the past, and could in the future be, provided inadvertently in violation of such laws. Violations of U.S. sanctions or export control regulations can result in significant fines or penalties and possible incarceration for responsible employees and managers.

If our channel partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export, or re-export licenses or permits, we may also be adversely affected through reputational harm, as well as other negative consequences, including government investigations and penalties.

Also, various countries, in addition to the United States, regulate the import and export of certain encryption and other technology, including import and export licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our offering or could limit our end-customers’ ability to implement our offering in those countries. Changes in our offering or future changes in export and import regulations may create delays in the introduction of our offering in international markets, prevent our end-customers with international operations from deploying our offering globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our offering to certain countries, governments or persons altogether. From time to time, various governmental agencies have proposed

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additional regulation of encryption technology. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, increased export and import controls, or change in the countries, governments, persons or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our offering by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell our offering to, existing or potential end-customers with international operations. Any decreased use of our offering or limitation on our ability to export or sell our offering would adversely affect our business, results of operations, and growth prospects.

We are subject to anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, and similar laws, and non-compliance with such laws can subject us to criminal or civil liability and harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

We are subject to the FCPA, U.S. domestic bribery laws, the UK Bribery Act, and other anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws in the countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been enforced aggressively in recent years and are interpreted broadly to generally prohibit companies, their employees, and their third-party intermediaries from authorizing, offering, or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits to recipients in the public or private sector. As we increase our international sales and business and sales to the public sector, we may engage with business partners and third-party intermediaries to market our offering and to obtain necessary permits, licenses, and other regulatory approvals. In addition, we or our third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities. We can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of these third-party intermediaries, our employees, representatives, contractors, partners, and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities.

While we have policies and procedures to address compliance with such laws, our employees and agents may take actions in violation of our policies and applicable law, for which we may be ultimately held responsible. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.

Detecting, investigating and resolving actual or alleged violations of anti-corruption laws can require a significant diversion of time, resources, and attention from senior management. In addition, noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-bribery or anti-money laundering laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, enforcement actions, fines, damages, other civil or criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension, or debarment from contracting with certain persons, reputational harm, adverse media coverage, and other collateral consequences. If any subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal proceeding, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense costs and other professional fees.

Changes in laws and regulations related to the internet or changes in the internet infrastructure itself may diminish the demand for our software, and could have a negative impact on our business.

The future success of our business, and particularly Confluent Cloud, depends upon the continued use of the internet as a primary medium for commerce, communication, and business applications. Federal, state or foreign government bodies or agencies have in the past adopted, and may in the future adopt, laws or regulations affecting the use of the internet as a commercial medium. Changes in these laws or regulations could require us to modify our software in order to comply with these changes. In addition, government agencies or private organizations may begin to impose taxes, fees or other charges for accessing the internet or commerce conducted via the internet. These laws or charges could limit the growth of internet-related commerce or communications generally, resulting in reductions in the demand for internet-based solutions such as ours.

In addition, the use of the internet as a business tool could be adversely affected due to delays in the development or adoption of new standards and protocols to handle increased demands of internet activity, security, reliability, cost, ease of use, accessibility, and quality of service. The performance of the internet and its

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acceptance as a business tool have been adversely affected by “ransomware,” “viruses,” “worms,” “malware,” “phishing attacks,” “data breaches,” and similar malicious programs, behavior, and events, and the internet has experienced a variety of outages and other delays as a result of damage to portions of its infrastructure. If the use of the internet is adversely affected by these issues, demand for our subscription offering and related services could suffer.

Changes in tax laws or tax rulings could harm our financial position and results of operations.

The tax regimes we are subject to or operate under, including income and non-income taxes, are unsettled and may be subject to significant change. Changes in tax laws, regulations, or rulings, or changes in interpretations of existing laws and regulations, could materially affect our financial position and results of operations. For example, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or the Tax Act, made broad and complex changes to the U.S. tax code, including changes to U.S. federal tax rates, additional limitations on the deductibility of interest, both positive and negative changes to the utilization of future net operating loss, or NOL, carryforwards, allowing for the expensing of certain capital expenditures, and putting into effect the migration from a “worldwide” system of taxation to a territorial system. The issuance of additional regulatory or accounting guidance related to the Tax Act could materially affect our tax obligations and effective tax rate in the period issued. In addition, many countries in Europe, as well as a number of other countries and organizations, have recently proposed or recommended changes to existing tax laws or have enacted new laws that could significantly increase our tax obligations in the countries where we do business or require us to change the manner in which we operate our business.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been working on a Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project, and issued a report in 2015, an interim report in 2018, and is expected to continue to issue guidelines and proposals that may change various aspects of the existing framework under which our tax obligations are determined in many of the countries in which we do business. Similarly, the European Commission and several countries have issued proposals that would change various aspects of the current tax framework under which we are taxed. These proposals include changes to the existing framework to calculate income tax, as well as proposals to change or impose new types of non-income taxes, including taxes based on a percentage of revenue. For example, several countries have proposed or enacted taxes applicable to digital services, which could apply to our business.

Due to the large and expanding scale of our international business activities, these types of changes to the taxation of our activities could increase our worldwide effective tax rate and increase the amount of taxes imposed on our business. Such changes may also apply retroactively to our historical operations and result in taxes greater than the amounts estimated and recorded in our consolidated financial statements. Any of these outcomes could harm our financial position and results of operations.

We could be required to collect additional sales taxes or be subject to other tax liabilities that may increase the costs our clients would have to pay for our offering and adversely affect our results of operations.

An increasing number of states have considered or adopted laws that attempt to impose tax collection obligations on out-of-state companies. Additionally, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. et al, or Wayfair, that online sellers can be required to collect sales and use tax despite not having a physical presence in the buyer’s state. In response to Wayfair, or otherwise, states or local governments may adopt, or begin to enforce, laws requiring us to calculate, collect and remit taxes on sales in their jurisdictions. A successful assertion by one or more states requiring us to collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do collect some taxes, could result in substantial tax liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as penalties and interest. The imposition by state governments or local governments of sales tax collection obligations on out-of-state sellers could also create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if they do not impose similar obligations on our competitors, and decrease our future sales, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

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Our ability to use our net operating losses to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations.

As of December 31, 2020, we had NOL carryforwards for federal and state income tax purposes of $264.5 million and $145.5 million, respectively, which may be available to offset taxable income in the future, and which expire in various years beginning in 2034 for federal purposes and 2027 for state purposes if not utilized. In addition, as of December 31, 2020, we had foreign NOL carryforwards of $6.3 million. A lack of future taxable income would adversely affect our ability to utilize these NOLs before they expire. In general, under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, a corporation that undergoes an “ownership change” (as defined under Section 382 of the Code and applicable Treasury Regulations) is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-change NOLs to offset future taxable income. We may experience a future ownership change (including, potentially, in connection with this offering) under Section 382 of the Code that could affect our ability to utilize the NOLs to offset our income. Furthermore, our ability to utilize NOLs of companies that we have acquired or may acquire in the future may be subject to limitations. There is also a risk that due to regulatory changes, such as suspensions on the use of NOLs or other unforeseen reasons, our existing NOLs could expire or otherwise be unavailable to reduce future income tax liabilities, including for state tax purposes. For these reasons, we may not be able to utilize a material portion of the NOLs reflected on our balance sheet, even if we attain profitability, which could potentially result in increased future tax liability to us and could adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition.

Changes in our effective tax rate or tax liability may have an adverse effect on our results of operations.

Our effective tax rate could increase due to several factors, including:

Any of these developments could adversely affect our results of operations.

Risks Related to Our Accounting Policies and Internal Controls

Our reported financial results may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles generally accepted in the United States.

GAAP are subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the SEC, and various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret appropriate accounting principles. A change in these principles or interpretations could have a significant effect on our reported results of operations and could affect the reporting of transactions already completed before the announcement of a change.

If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies prove to be incorrect, our results of operations could be adversely affected.

The preparation of financial statements in conformity with GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in our consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as provided in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Critical Accounting

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Policies and Estimates.” The results of these estimates form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities and equity, and the amount of revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. Significant estimates and judgments involve revenue recognition, deferred contract costs, and the valuation of our stock-based compensation awards, including the determination of fair value of our Class A common stock, among others. Our results of operations may be adversely affected if our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, which could cause our results of operations to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.

As a result of being a public company, we are obligated to develop and maintain proper and effective internal control over financial reporting, and any failure to maintain the adequacy of these internal controls may adversely affect investor confidence in our company and, as a result, the value of our Class A common stock.

We are required, pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Section 404, to furnish a report by management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting for the year ending December 31, 2023. This assessment will need to include disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. In addition, our independent registered public accounting firm will be required to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting in our first annual report required to be filed with the SEC following the date we are no longer an “emerging growth company.” We have recently commenced the costly and challenging process of compiling the system and processing documentation necessary to perform the evaluation needed to comply with Section 404, but we may not be able to complete our evaluation, testing and any required remediation in a timely fashion once initiated. Our compliance with Section 404 will require that we incur substantial expenses and expend significant management efforts. We currently do not have an internal audit group, and we will need to hire additional accounting and financial staff with appropriate public company experience and technical accounting knowledge and compile the system and process documentation necessary to perform the evaluation needed to comply with Section 404.

During the evaluation and testing process of our internal controls, if we identify one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to certify that our internal control over financial reporting is effective. We cannot assure you that there will not be material weaknesses or significant deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting in the future. Any failure to maintain internal control over financial reporting could severely inhibit our ability to accurately report our financial condition or results of operations. If we are unable to conclude that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or if our independent registered public accounting firm determines we have a material weakness or significant deficiency in our internal control over financial reporting, we could lose investor confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by the SEC or other regulatory authorities. Failure to remedy any material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting, or to implement or maintain other effective control systems required of public companies, could also restrict our future access to the capital markets.

Risks Related to Ownership of Our Class A Common Stock

The dual class structure of our common stock as contained in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our stock prior to this offering, including our executive officers, employees, and directors and their affiliates, and limiting your ability to influence corporate matters, which could adversely affect the trading price of our Class A common stock.

Our Class B common stock has 10 votes per share, and our Class A common stock, which is the stock we are offering in this initial public offering, has one vote per share. Based on shares of common stock held as of March 31, 2021, stockholders who hold shares of Class B common stock, including our executive officers and

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directors and their affiliates, will together hold approximately 99.0% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock following this offering, and our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Kreps, will beneficially own approximately 11.5% of our outstanding classes of common stock as a whole, but will control approximately 12.4% of the voting power of our outstanding common stock, following this offering. As a result, our executive officers, directors, and other affiliates and potentially our Chief Executive Officer on his own will have significant influence over our management and affairs and over all matters requiring stockholder approval, including election of directors and significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of the company or our assets, for the foreseeable future. Even if Mr. Kreps is no longer employed with us, he will continue to have the same influence over matters requiring stockholder approval.

In addition, the holders of Class B common stock collectively will continue to be able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval even if their stock holdings represent less than 50% of the outstanding shares of our common stock. Because of the 10-to-1 voting ratio between our Class B common stock and Class A common stock, the holders of our Class B common stock collectively will continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock even when the shares of Class B common stock represent as little as 10% of the combined voting power of all outstanding shares of our Class A common stock and Class B common stock. This concentrated control will limit your ability to influence corporate matters for the foreseeable future, and, as a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected.

Future transfers by holders of shares of Class B common stock will generally result in those shares converting to shares of Class A common stock, which will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common stock who retain their shares in the long term. Certain permitted transfers, as specified in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation that will be in effect immediately prior to the closing of this offering, will not result in shares of Class B common stock automatically converting to shares of Class A common stock, including certain estate planning transfers as well as transfers to our founders or our founders’ estates or heirs upon death or incapacity of such founder. If, for example, Mr. Kreps (or family trusts to which he were to transfer shares of Class B common stock) retain a significant portion of his holdings of Class B common stock for an extended period of time, he (or such trusts) could, in the future, control a majority of the combined voting power of our Class A common stock and Class B common stock. As a board member, Mr. Kreps owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As a stockholder, Mr. Kreps is entitled to vote his shares in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally.

FTSE Russell and Standard & Poor’s do not allow most newly public companies utilizing dual or multi-class capital structures to be included in their indices. Affected indices include the Russell 2000 and the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600, which together make up the S&P Composite 1500. Also, in 2017, MSCI, a leading stock index provider, opened public consultations on its treatment of no-vote and multi-class structures and temporarily barred new multi-class listings from certain of its indices; however, in October 2018, MSCI announced its decision to include equity securities “with unequal voting structures” in its indices and to launch a new index that specifically includes voting rights in its eligibility criteria. Under the announced policies, our dual class capital structure would make us ineligible for inclusion in certain indices, and as a result, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and other investment vehicles that attempt to passively track these indices will not be investing in our stock. In addition, we cannot assure you that other stock indices will not take similar actions. Given the sustained flow of investment funds into passive strategies that seek to track certain indices, exclusion from certain stock indices would likely preclude investment by many of these funds and would make our Class A common stock less attractive to other investors. As a result, the trading price, volume, and liquidity of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected.

Our stock price may be volatile, and the value of our Class A common stock may decline.

The market price of our Class A common stock may be highly volatile and may fluctuate or decline substantially as a result of a variety of factors, some of which are beyond our control, including:

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