June 23 (Reuters) - Infrastructure software startup Confluent Inc said on Wednesday it had sold shares in its U.S. initial public offering (IPO) above its target range to raise $828 million.

Confluent priced 23 million shares at $36 per share. The company had previously priced its share between $29 and $33 apiece.

The IPO values Confluent at $9 billion.

There have been a flurry of major tech listings as a number of startups look to capitalize on the sky-high investor demand for new, high-growth tech stocks.

The company counts venture capital firms Benchmark Capital Partners VIII LP, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures among its prominent backers. Benchmark, which owns about 15.3% of Confluent's common stock, is the largest shareholder, according to a regulatory filing last week.

Confluent uses Apache Kafka, an open source event streaming platform used by 70% of Fortune 500 companies.

Its offerings can be used through Confluent Cloud, an on-demand software-as-a-service that is available on Amazon.com Inc's AWS and Microsoft Corp's Azure platforms among others, or the Confluent Platform software.

Founded in 2014 by former LinkedIn employees, Confluent counts Expedia Group Inc, Intel Corp and Humana Inc as major customers.

Confluent shares are scheduled to start trading on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the symbol "CFLT". Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters for the IPO. (Reporting by Echo Wang in Asheville N.C.; additional reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and David Gregorio)