Cloudera Said to Choose Banks for IPO as Soon as This Year

By Alex Barinka (Bloomberg) -- Cloudera Inc., the big-data company backed by Intel Corp., hired underwriters for an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The company, based in Palo Alto, California, is eyeing a valuation of about $4.1 billion, said the people, in line with what it fetched in its last private round three years ago. Cloudera notified a number of firms this month that they’d been picked to lead the IPO, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

After a quiet start to 2017, the U.S. market for technology IPOs market will face its first test this week. Snap Inc., the maker of the disappearing-photo app, is seeking to raise as much as $3.2 billion in an IPO scheduled to price Wednesday that could value the company at as much as $18.5 billion.

Smaller enterprise-technology companies MuleSoft Inc. and Alteryx Inc. both filed to go public this month.

A representative for Cloudera didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The company creates tools and provides services that center on the open-source data analysis software, Hadoop. Its technology helps wrangle mass amounts of data, analyze it and use it to make decisions in real time. Cloudera competes with the likes of Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.

It has raised upwards of $1 billion in private funding, including a $900 million round in March 2014. That injection included $740 million from Intel, as well as 160 million from investors T. Rowe Price Group Inc., Google Inc.’s venture arm and Michael Dell’s investment firm, MSD Capital LP.