Cloudera files to raise $200M in IPO; the company lost $187M on $261M in revenue for the year ending January 31
Big data software company Cloudera today submitted its S-1 filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CLDR. — Joint underwriters on the deal include …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cloudera [[a:917232|confidentially filed for its IPO in March, seeking a $4.1B valuation with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and BofA as underwriters]]; today's public S-1 converts that private ambition into disclosed numbers — and they are stark: $187M lost on just $261M of revenue for the year ending January 31.
The filing matters because it forces the first hard public accounting of the big-data software buildout. When Cloudera closes its debut up 20%+ at a $2.3B market cap, the gap against the $4.1B privately sought will read as the market's discount on that burn rate.
First-order effects
- Investors pricing CLDR must underwrite a company spending roughly $0.72 beyond every revenue dollar, making the $200M raise a liquidity bridge rather than a growth war chest.
- Underwriters Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and BofA have to sell a NYSE listing whose headline metric is a loss nearly as large as annual revenue.
Second-order effects
- Rival big-data vendors eyeing their own exits now face a public benchmark: Cloudera's reception will set the price at which loss-making enterprise-software peers can go public or must instead seek buyers.
- A public Cloudera comes under quarterly pressure to convert its model toward recurring revenue — a direction its later disclosures of rising subscription revenue and ARR confirm.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 2017 enterprise-infrastructure cohort gets sorted by public markets into those that can bend the loss curve toward subscriptions and those absorbed by larger consolidators.
- Deep-loss IPOs of this era establish the template — and the cautionary case — for how public investors discount private-market valuations when growth-stage companies finally disclose real financials.
The trend: Big-data infrastructure vendors are being pushed from private, growth-at-any-cost valuations toward public-market scrutiny that rewards recurring-revenue conversion over raw scale.