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March 18, 2014

Cloudera Valuation Tops $2B After Latest Funding Round

Alex Woodie

Cloudera today announced an additional $160 million in funding, bringing the Hadoop distributor’s total venture haul to $300 million. The software company now values itself at more than $2 billion, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that Hadoop rival Intel has invested in the firm.

The Series F round was led by T. Rowe Price, and included an investment by Google Ventures and an affiliate of Michael Dell’s investment firm. It was Cloudera’s latest funding announcement since December 2012, when it a $65 million investment byAccel Partners. Other investors over the years include Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm.

Bloomberg today reported that Cloudera’s latest round of venture funding exceeded $200 million, and that the latest round valued the company at more than $2 billion. A separate story in the San Francisco Business Times had Cloudera valuing itself at $1.84 billion, a number that it got from VCExperts.com, a firm that tracks venture capital activity.

“A government filing shows that Cloudera’s board of directors in February authorized the sale of 14.4 million shares at a price of $14.56 per share, which was nearly double the $7.40 per share price in the last round, said VCExperts.com,” the Times Patrick Hoge wrote. Cloudera valued itself at $700 million the previous round, which pegs its current self-valuation “as high as $1.84 billion,” Hoge wrote.

Cloudera, which had about $73 million in revenue last year according to Wikibon, plans to use the cash to push its vision of Hadoop as an enterprise data hub. Specifically, the company says it will use the funding to expand into Europe and Asia, bolster its service and support business, and scale the field and engineering organizations. The Palo Alto, California, company has about 1,000 customers, according to Gartner, making it the most successful vendor in the hottest sector of the IT market.

Henry Ellenbogen, portfolio manager for T. Rowe Price’s New Horizons Fund, said: “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.”

With so many new initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock being announced, one wonders whether Cloudera might have been better served heading to the public markets to get the capital needed to grow its business. That could be in the cards, says Cloudera CFO Jim Frankola told Bloomberg. “It’s not around the corner, but we’re not one of those companies that will take years to get there either.”

Related Items:

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Reaping the Fruits of Hadoop Labor in 2014

Cloudera Articulates a ‘Data Hub’ Future for Hadoop

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