Big Data Analyzer Cloudera Banks $160M in VC Funding

Cloudera, a pioneering provider of Hadoop batch and real-time analytics solutions for the enterprise, announced March 18 that it has closed a new round of financing worth $160 million, led by top-tier institutional and strategic investors.

To date, six-year-old Cloudera has raised $300 million in venture funding. This latest 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.

Cloudera said it will use the funding 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 the field and engineering organizations.

Cloudera has incorporated enterprise capabilities and more power into the Hadoop platform with such features as real-time query with its open source Cloudera Impala; real-time search support with Lucene and Solr; security with Cloudera’s Apache Sentry project; integrated governance, compliance, reporting and disaster recovery—all onto the Hadoop platform.

Recently, Cloudera brought to market what it claims to be the industry’s first complete enterprise data hub, a major step in the evolution of enterprise data management.

Data hubs enable data centers to be free from dependency on expensive, specialized data storage and compute systems. They also enable enterprises to store any amount of data, of any type, and keep it online as long as needed; to ensure that data is secure and governed to meet enterprise requirements; and to accommodate huge and varied data sets for more meaningful and timely analytics.

“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.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company last year made a change in leadership at the top, recruiting former Hewlett-Packard security executive Tom Reilly to be its new CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Mike Olson moved to take dual roles of chief strategy officer and chairman of Cloudera’s board of directors.

Hadoop co-developer Doug Cutting is the company’s CTO.