Hadoop Pioneer Cloudera Raises Whopping $160 Million

From pioneer to leader, big data powerhouse Cloudera brings its total amount raised to $300 million, after announcing that it has closed a new $160 million financing round to accelerate its growth in 2014. This round was led by T. Rowe Price, along with three other top-tier 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.

The company will use the funds 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 its field and engineering organizations.

"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."

Vote of Confidence in Hadoop

Cloudera believes that 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. The latest round of funding validates the mainstream adoption of Hadoop among enterprises today and Cloudera's leadership in what many believe is the most important technology sea change in the data center for the next decade.

The success of Hadoop has also drawn the attention of big, established players in the market, including most leading enterprise software companies. Recently Cloudera was added to the Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems.

"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."

"When Cloudera emerged from stealth in 2009, the vision was to bring Hadoop to the enterprise," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at 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."