Like so many of the other tasks involved in data analytics, aggregating records for processing can become incredibly difficult on a large scale. Confluent Inc. has convinced some of Silicon Valley’s top investors that it’s uniquely positioned to address the challenge.

The three-year-old startup today announced it has secured $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Index Ventures. Confluent will use the financing to fuel the growth of its data streaming platform, which is based on the Apache Kafka project that Chief Executive Jay Kreps and his two co-founders created during their time at LinkedIn.

The software was developed to handle the massive amounts of information the social network collects from its platform. Kafka can transport hundreds of billions of data points a day while maintaining consistently low latency levels, a combination that lends itself well to real-time analytics. Since becoming open-source in 2011, the technology has been adopted by most of the Fortune 500 along with Airbnb Inc., Box Inc. and numerous tech firms that employ its capabilities to power their core services.

Confluent’s platform augments Kafka with a set of value-added features designed to ease the management of large-scale deployments. It’s available in two flavors: a free version aimed at making it easier for developers to work with the system and a commercial edition that adds capabilities for automating backend maintenance operations.

The main highlight of the latter offering is the Confluent Control Center, a monitoring console that offers to give organizations visibility into the data processed by their Kafka clusters. Confluent says that the dashboard makes it possible to diagnose every component of a deployment and set alerts to trigger if something is amiss. For added measure, the startup provides training services alongside its software that aim to help administrators get a better understanding of how to handle the system.

Confluent’s value proposition has struck a chord in Kafka installed base. The startup saw a more than sevenfold increase in the annual contract value of its software bookings last year on the back of deals with Tivo.com Corp., healthcare technology giant Surescripts LLC and “many” other new customers.

As part of today’s investment, Sequoia partner Matt Miller is joining the Confluent board oversee the next phase of its growth efforts. The startup has raised more than $80 million in outside capital to date.

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