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Event Store, a startup that aims to unify streaming data systems and databases, today announced today that it has changed its name to Kurrent to better reflect its goals. The company also announced $12 million in funding, as well as the launch of Kurrent Enterprise Edition.
The gap between systems of record and streaming data systems has caused a lot of pain and additional work for developers over the years. The pain stems from how developers utilize state-based data models via databases like PostgreSQL, versus how they use event-driven streaming data systems, such as Apache Kafka.
Database-centric organizations often resort to invasive solutions, such as using a change data capture (CDC) tool to tap into the databases event log to get to the latest, greatest data (which doesn’t entirely eliminate latency), or perhaps using a fast in-memory database that can serve as both a streaming system and a database (which limits scalability). Companies coming from the “streaming-first” side of the equation may install an additional data store, such as Kafka’s KStore, to establish an immutable record, at the cost of adding data-integration complexity and additional points of failure. No approach has proven ideal.
The folks at Kurrent (formerly Event Store) think they have come up with a novel approach that’s centered around its native event format. Kurrent says that its data platform combines the immutable storage of a database with the real-time capabilities of a streaming system, thereby giving application developers the capability to give fresh, streaming data the historical context that’s needed to deliver business insights in real time.
Kurrent CEO Kirk Dunn explains how the Kurrent platform works:
“It originates and aggregates data from multiple sources, curates it and preserves its integrity in an immutable, globally ordered log. The platform then streams fine-grained event data directly to the points of need. This unified approach eliminates the trade-offs between static storage and dynamic streaming, ensuring both robust data persistence and real-time accessibility,” Dunn tells BigDATAwire.
By storing data in a globally ordered, immutable log, Kurrent preserves both state and context throughout their lifecycle, he continues.
“By maintaining the chronological order and relational context of events, Kurrent enables downstream systems to construct meaningful insights and tell complete stories,” Dunn says. “This event-native approach ensures the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind the data are always accessible, delivering high-context information to real-time and historical use cases.”
Kirk Dunn, Kurrent CEO
Kurrent says its system can replace the need for both traditional databases as well as data streaming systems, although it can also work with either type of system if a company has already built applications around them. With the latest update to its enterprise product now known as the Kurrent Enterprise Edition, the company added connectors for Kafka, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ. It also added support for policy-based stream authorization and encryption-at-rest.
One of the use cases Kurrent’s leaders envision for the platform is bolstering existing Kafka implementations, particularly for indexing and event-filtering workloads. Developers building new real-time applications are also on the target list, as well as companies implementing generative AI and agentic AI systems that require context to produce viable outcomes.
Kurrent’s approach resonated with Crane Venture Partners, the venture capital firm that led the $12 million funding round announced today. Krishna Visvanathan, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, says Kurrent’s will unlock new capabilities necessary for overcoming the long-standing difficulty in integrating state- and event-based systems.
“Kurrent solves this challenge by delivering context-rich data events, giving businesses the complete picture they need to understand and act on their opportunities,” Visvanathan says in a press release. “By seamlessly unifying streaming software and traditional databases, Kurrent’s event-native approach fills a critical gap in the modern data stack, solving a pervasive problem and positioning the company at the forefront of the enterprise AI revolution.”
As for the new name, Kurrent CEO Dunn says it represents how data flows like electrical current through an enterprise.
“We have built a modern data platform that allows companies to originate data, aggregate data from other sources, curate it and maintain its integrity,” he says. “Then, like electrical distribution systems, it can stream the data specifically to the exact point of need enabling companies to serve their customers in very granular ways, delivering specific data by topic, by customer, by group of products or whatever granular designation is defined by the company with high context and in real time.”
Dunn, who was the COO of Cloudera from 2011 to 2015, joined Kurrent (then Event Store) in October. At the same time, the company hired David Wang, who headed storage teams at Cloudera, to be its new VP of engineering. Kurrent was founded in 2019 by Greg Young and is based in San Francisco. The company counts Walmart, Xero, and Linedata among its customers. For more info, see www.kurrent.io.
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