Cloudera Raises as Much as $160 Million in Just One Round

Cloudera, Inc. has closed a new round of financing of $160 million led by institutional and strategic investors.

To date the company has raised $300 million in venture funding.

This round was led by T. Rowe Price, along with three other public market investors, and included an investment by Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family.

This financing cements Cloudera’s position in the Hadoop market and sets up the company for accelerated growth in 2014 and beyond.

Cloudera will use the funding to:

further drive the enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market;
support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia;
expand its services and support capabilities; and
scale the field and engineering organizations.

In addition, this round of funding validates the adoption of Hadoop among enterprises and Cloudera’s leadership in what many believe is the most important technology sea change in the data center for the next decade – the move to Hadoop for storing, processing and analyzing the vast quantities of data commonly referred to as big data.

“Cloudera is successfully helping enterprises exploit ‘big data’ and manage the transition to becoming more data centric,” said Henry Ellenbogen, portfolio manager, T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund. “With strong leadership, an ability to innovate, a satisfied customer base, and a large partner community, we believe Cloudera is well positioned to build a durable and leading company in this space.”

Industry Traction for Hadoop
Data is strategic and mission-critical to companies in every vertical market – companies that aren’t information-driven find themselves at a strategic disadvantage compared to their peers – and in most cases Hadoop has emerged as the de facto choice for the underlying data management technology making it possible to store, process and analyze vastly larger and more complex datasets than ever before.

“We see broad demand from enterprises who want a flexible approach to handling large amounts of data, and we expect this market to continue to grow rapidly,” said Google Ventures general partner Karim Faris. “Cloudera is dramatically lowering the cost of reliable storage for the enterprise and is enabling the analysis and mining of large data sets in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

Today a growing number of large enterprises are building enterprise data hubs built on Hadoop to address a variety of data challenges and increasingly to work with data in more ways, not only for processing and archiving, but now for self-service BI and advanced analytics. The success of Hadoop has also drawn the attention of big, established players in the market, including leading enterprise software companies. Many with decades of experience serving large and demanding customers are now building out software and systems that incorporate Hadoop.

Cloudera has driven enterprise capabilities and more power into the Hadoop platform by the incorporation of real-time query with its open source Cloudera Impala; real-time search support with Lucene and Solr; security with Cloudera’s Apache Sentry project; integrated governance, compliance, reporting and DR – all onto the Hadoop platform.

Complete Enterprise Data Hub
Recently, Cloudera brought to market a complete enterprise data hub, a step in the evolution of enterprise data management. Ir believes an enterprise data hub is an essential component of any modern data center that:

Frees them from being dependent on expensive, specialized storage and compute systems, and instead take advantage of the power of industry-standard server hardware and scale-out architecture;
Enables enterprises to store any amount of data, of any type, and keep it online as long as needed;
Ensures that data is secure and governed to meet enterprise requirements;
Makes it possible for customers to “bring compute to the data,” to build a single unified data system rather than moving data around from one system to another;
Lets customers offload selected data and workloads from expensive, specialized data warehouse infrastructure to alleviate the pain of missed SLAs and degraded query performance;
Can accommodate huge and varied data sets for more meaningful and timely analytics and enable innovative security solutions, such as real-time anomaly detection without duplicating data or building custom, specialized solutions.

With an enterprise data hub, enterprises can now take on large scale, more advanced and diverse workloads and realize new strategic benefits from their data that was previously discarded or difficult to incorporate into business insights. Cloudera strives to offer its customers high level of extensibility and security to enable the recommendation systems, security information and event management, graph analytics and machine learning capabilities that monetize data, without the costs typically associated with specialized tools.

“When Cloudera emerged from stealth in 2009, the vision was to bring Hadoop to the enterprise,” said Tom Reilly, CEO, Cloudera. “At the time, the idea of big data was on the cusp of adoption. Five years later, Cloudera is setting the standard for how enterprises across all verticals are managing their big data. The market demand for these technologies is fierce as companies realize the competitive advantage and strategic value of their data. We are thrilled to have the backing of major institutional and strategic investors in this latest round and are well positioned to drive our vision and company growth at an even faster pace.”

Allen & Company LLC served as financial adviser to Cloudera and assisted the company in putting together this financing.