Cloudera, a US-based big data company, has secured $160m in venture capital from investors including Google Ventures, Google’s corporate venturing unit, among others, and reports suggest that US-based computing company Intel is set to help bring the round to $200m.
Investment firm T. Rowe Price led the round, which also saw participation from an affiliate of MSD Capital, Michael S. Dell’s private investment firm. Cloudera said in a statement that it has now raised more than $300m in equity funding since it was founded.
Previous investors in Cloudera include In-Q-Tel, the VC unit representing the US intelligence community, which invested in both Cloudera’s $40m series D round in 2011 and its $65m series E round in 2012, as well as VC firms Meritech Capital Partners, Ignition Partners, Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and micro VC firm SV Angel.
Cloudera is also seeking to boost the latest round’s total. Sources have told Bloomberg that Cloudera is raising a $200m VC round in which US-based computing company Intel would be the lead investor.
Formed in California in 2008, Cloudera operates an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop software, one it refers to as the first unified ‘Platform for Big Data’. A business can store, process and analyse its data on the system, and Cloudera said the funding illustrates that Hadoop software is becoming increasingly mainstream among enterprises.
“When Cloudera emerged from stealth in 2009, the vision was to bring Hadoop to the enterprise,” said Cloudera chief executive Tom Reilly. “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.”
Cloudera plans to invest the funds in accelerating the adoption of its platform, including through international expansion to Europe and Asia, and in further promoting the enterprise data hub market in general.
“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,” added Karim Faris, general partner at Google Ventures. “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.”