Big Data Firm Cloudera Prices Shares Way Below Private Valuation

SEC filing reveals big losses in 2016, expected to continue indefinitely

Chris Burt

April 19, 2017

2 Min Read
Big Data Firm Cloudera Prices Shares Way Below Private Valuation
(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

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As enterprise big data company Cloudera readies its imminent IPO, it has set its expected share price at $12 to $14, for a valuation of up to $1.8 billion, 56 percent less than its last private funding round. Cloudera’s 2014 Series F funding round gave the company a valuation of $4.1 billion.

In filings with the SEC, Cloudera revealed revenues of $261 million for fiscal 2016, up 57 percent from $166 million the previous year. The company lost over $186 million in 2016, however, $203 million in 2015, and $135 million in 2014. Further, the company says in its Form S-1 that it expects net losses to continue “for the foreseeable future.”

The filing lists competition from “legacy data management product providers” HP, IBM, Oracle, and Teradata, public cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, and open source companies Hortonworks and MapR.

As other reports noted, the market cap for Cloudera could hurt one of its largest investors: Intel, whose investment in Cloudera totals over $1 billion since it was founded 2008, according to Crunchbase. According to Forbes, “in May 2014, Intel took a 22 percent stake in Cloudera — investing about $766 million at $30.92 a share — when the company was valued at $4 billion.” Intel and Cloudera jointly developed machine learning intelligence threat platform Apache Spot, which was announced in September.

IPO valuations for tech companies lower than previous funding rounds, or “IPO down rounds,” have previously been identified as possible trend by TechCrunch, but are not necessarily major cause for market concern. Application performance management company AppDynamics was set for an IPO with the same share price range as Cloudera and a similar valuation in January before announcing its surprise sale to Cisco for $3.7 billion.

Cloudera is expected to hold its IPO in the next several weeks on the New York Stock Exchange as “CLDR.”

This article originally appeared on TheWhir.

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