Big data software player Cloudera has raised US$900m in a financing round that includes Intel, Google Ventures and Michael Dell and his family. The lion’s share of the investment – some US$740m – is understood to come from Intel.
The round includes the previously-announced US$160m of funding from T. Rowe Price and three other top-tier public market investors, Google Ventures, and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment arm of Dell founder Michael Dell and his family, and a significant equity investment by Intel that gives it an 18pc share of Cloudera.
“The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera.
“Clearly, demand is accelerating and the market is poised for growth for all of the players in this space, and we believe Cloudera will be the company to lead this global shift in extracting value from data.
“This position of strength and leadership is evidenced by the strong support of public market investors, large institutional investors and now key strategic investors including Intel, who’ve made sizable and significant contributions to cement our platform offering.”
The making of a next-generation software giant
Cloudera pioneered the commercial Hadoop market, when it was founded in 2008 and was the only company promoting this new architecture.
Hadoop is the underlying technology behind a growing number of big-data projects.
Gartner estimates the market for data management infrastructure (database management systems including data warehousing, storage management, BI, ECM and data integration, and related systems) as US$74bn in 2014, growing to US$94bn by 2017.
IDC predicted the big data technology and services market will grow at a CAGR of 27pc from 2012 to 2017, growing to US$32.4bn, and that the internet of things will generate 30bn autonomously connected endpoints.
Gartner predicted that big data would drive US$232bn in IT spending through 2016.
IDC estimates that the amount of data in the world will grow fifty-fold from 2010 to 2020.
“Intel’s sizable investment in Cloudera, alongside funding from institutional investors, Google Ventures and MSD Capital, are all indicative of both the very large market opportunity and the leadership position of Cloudera,” said Jim Frankola, chief financial officer for Cloudera.
“These investments give us significant financial resources to accelerate growth and deliver long-term sustainable value to our customers and partners.”
Big data image via Shutterstock
