Exclusive: Cloudera Closes Massive $65 Million Funding Round at $700 Million Valuation
Whenever you hear the phrase “big data” these days, and depending on whom you're talking to, the word Hadoop usually isn't far behind. When companies and large organizations seek to tackle the biggest …
Context & Ripple Effects
Thirteen months after Ignition, Accel and Greylock put $40 million into Cloudera, the Hadoop distributor has more than doubled its raise with this $65 million round at a $700 million valuation. The step-up tracks the arc the company set out on in 2011: turning Apache Hadoop, an open-source project built for web-scale data processing, into packaged enterprise software that large organizations can buy.
The story traveled unusually wide on pickup day — Fortune, TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, SiliconANGLE, GeekWire, bizjournals and Market Wire all carried it within about a day of AllThingsD's exclusive — a signal that big-data infrastructure funding had become a beat of its own by December 2012.
First-order effects
- Cloudera exits the round with roughly $105 million raised across the two rounds and a $700 million valuation, giving it capital to scale sales, support and engineering around its Hadoop distribution while competitors race to match its enterprise footprint.
- The round re-prices commercial open-source data infrastructure in venture terms: an Apache project with no license fees now anchors a seven-hundred-million-dollar private market value.
Second-order effects
- Rival Hadoop distributors face pressure to raise comparable war chests or differentiate on price and service, since Cloudera can now outspend them on the enterprise sales and support layers where Hadoop revenue actually accrues.
- Investors who doubled down — Accel, Greylock and Ignition among the earlier backers — validate a template other big-data startups will shop to the same firms, tightening competition for enterprise-data deals and talent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Hadoop distribution consolidates into a small set of heavily capitalized platforms competing on support and management tooling rather than on the underlying free code — a structure that points toward IPO-scale outcomes for whoever wins enterprise share.
- The round marks Hadoop's shift from experimental web-company technology to a default layer of corporate IT, pulling adjacent vendors — storage, analytics, BI — into building integrations around whichever distribution their customers standardize on.
The trend: Open-source infrastructure companies are graduating from modest seed-stage bets to hundred-million-dollar-plus growth rounds as projects like Hadoop become the standard data plumbing of the enterprise.