Confluent's third quarter was met with a significant positive market reaction, driven by robust cloud revenue growth and expanding adoption of its data streaming products. Management attributed the performance to increased late-stage pipeline activity, particularly from enterprise customers deepening their engagement with Confluent Cloud and newer offerings like Flink. CEO Jay Kreps emphasized the impact of field alignment efforts and the acceleration of new use cases moving into production, stating, “momentum continued in Q3 with more than 40% sequential growth in progressing late-stage pipeline and an accelerating pace of new use cases.”

Is now the time to buy CFLT? Find out in our full research report (it’s free for active Edge members).

While we enjoy listening to the management's commentary, our favorite part of earnings calls are the analyst questions. Those are unscripted and can often highlight topics that management teams would rather avoid or topics where the answer is complicated. Here is what has caught our attention.

Our Top 5 Analyst Questions From Confluent’s Q3 Earnings Call

• Brad Zelnick (Deutsche Bank) asked about go-to-market changes and pipeline conversion capacity. CEO Jay Kreps explained improved field alignment and specialization enabled more use cases to reach production, which drives future consumption.
• Sanjit Singh (Morgan Stanley) questioned when growth will bottom and the impact of new offerings on core business. Kreps noted cloud growth stability, attributing deal size increases to customers migrating larger workloads, with multi-tenant architectures supporting gross margin.
• Mark Murphy (JPMorgan) inquired about late-stage pipeline growth and streaming agent adoption. Kreps emphasized that new use cases reaching production are a leading indicator for future revenue, and described early streaming agent uptake as promising for enterprise AI.
• Raimo Lenschow (Barclays) focused on Flink’s growth and Q4 guidance drivers. CFO Rohan Sivaram detailed strong Flink adoption and cited new use cases and normalized optimization as supporting their outlook.
• Ryan MacWilliams (Wells Fargo) asked about AI production use cases and the impact of a large customer moving to self-managed. Kreps described a broad range of AI use cases in production, while Sivaram clarified the anticipated revenue impact and guidance assumptions.

Catalysts in Upcoming Quarters

In the quarters ahead, the StockStory team will closely monitor (1) the pace of new use cases moving from pilot to production, which is critical for sustaining cloud consumption growth; (2) customer adoption and expansion of Flink and streaming agent products, given their early momentum; and (3) the evolving partner ecosystem’s contribution to new business. Additional attention will be paid to the company’s ability to maintain operating margin improvements as it balances growth investments with optimization trends.

Confluent currently trades at $23.44, up from $22.06 just before the earnings. In the wake of this quarter, is it a buy or sell? The answer lies in our full research report (it’s free for active Edge members).

High-Quality Stocks for All Market Conditions

Fresh US-China trade tensions just tanked stocks—but strong bank earnings are fueling a sharp rebound. Don’t miss the bounce.

Don’t let fear keep you from great opportunities and take a look at Top 5 Strong Momentum Stocks for this week. This is a curated list of our High Quality stocks that have generated a market-beating return of 183% over the last five years (as of March 31st 2025).

Stocks that made our list in 2020 include now familiar names such as Nvidia (+1,545% between March 2020 and March 2025) as well as under-the-radar businesses like the once-micro-cap company Tecnoglass (+1,754% five-year return). Find your next big winner with StockStory today.

StockStory is growing and hiring equity analyst and marketing roles. Are you a 0 to 1 builder passionate about the markets and AI? See the open roles here.