Steffen Hoellinger

Field CTO, EMEA @ Confluent

About

I am a Field CTO at Confluent, where I help global enterprises harness the full potential of real-time data and AI by bringing Apache Flink and Apache Kafka to the core of their architectures. I partner with customers to modernize their data infrastructure, integrating AI models, metadata, data governance and data lineage to unlock new capabilities for agentic AI powered by continuous intelligence on streaming data. I have been writing code and handling infrastructure since my teenage years. Strongly interested in data streaming, distributed databases and AI technologies. I am also an investor in early startups, primarily focussed on data infrastructure, AI and deep tech.

Country

Germany

City

Berlin

Industry

Computer Software

Skill

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Management, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, Data Streaming, Product Strategy, Start-ups, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Large Language Models (LLM), Project Management, Product Development, Data Infrastructure, Conversational AI, Investments, Business Strategy, Company Set-up, Angel Investing, Corporate Law

Experience

Field CTO, EMEA

Confluent

2025-9 - Present · 1 yr 1 mo

Berlin, Germany

I help global enterprises harness the full potential of real-time data and AI by bringing Apache Flink and Apache Kafka to the core of their architectures. I partner with customers to modernize their data infrastructure, integrating AI models, metadata, data governance and data lineage to unlock new capabilities for agentic AI powered by continuous intelligence on streaming data.

CEO & Co-Founder

Airy

2015 - 2025-9 · 10 yrs

San Francisco Bay Area

Real-time data infrastructure for AI agents, utilizing metadata to dynamically generate stream processing jobs from natural language. Acquired by Confluent (CFLT) in September 2025.

Founding Shareholder

Delivery Hero

2011 - 2017 · 6 yrs

Berlin, Germany

Delivery Hero is a top global food delivery platform, active in ~70 markets. - €47.6B GMV in 2023 - IPO: Frankfurt Stock Exchange, June 2017 (Symbol: DHER)

Partner

Team Global

2008 - 2013 · 5 yrs

Berlin, Germany

Company Builder / Incubator of Companies (selection): - Delivery Hero (IPO, 2017) - Fyber / SponsorPay (sold to RNTS Media, now part of Digital Turbine) - madvertise (merged with mobilike / sold to Opera)

Partner & Advisor

Point Nine

2008-9 - 2011-2 · 2 yrs 6 mos

Berlin Area, Germany

Point Nine is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on B2B SaaS and B2B marketplaces. Point Nine originated from the first Team Europe fund started in 2008 in which I was a partner alongside Lukasz Gadowski, Pawel Chudzinski and Kolja Hebenstreit. Christoph Janz joined Pawel Chudzinski as managing partner in 2011 for the second Point Nine fund for which I continued to serve as an advisor.