“Many companies were finding it difficult to scale their data operations,” Orban told TechCrunch. “And they were struggling to tap the full potential of their data, leaving vast amounts unused or siloed.”

After noodling around for a bit, Orban, Derosiaux and Maarek concluded that Kafka, cumbersome as it was, wasn’t a total loss. It might work, they thought, if you could spruce it up with some tooling.