Cloudera Raises Staggering $900 Million, Cozies Up to Intel

Everyone heralded a new era for commercial efforts surrounding open source when Red Hat became the first open source company to hit $1 billion in revenue. Now it's time to mark another milestone as Cloudera, the pioneering startup focused on enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, has announced a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. You read it right: $900 million.

This financing round includes a previously-announced $160 million 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 Michael Dell and his family, and a significant equity investment by Intel that gives them an 18 percent share of Cloudera. That is some solid backing.

Here on OStatic, we've covered Cloudera since its early roots in 2008, as the Big Data trend started to ramp up and Hadoop become an uber-successful open source project.  Aside from the whopping amount of money it has just received, Cloudera is also going to be closely partnered with Intel and have the backing and advisory services of Michael Dell. Those alliances could be as meaningful as the money, as Matt Asay notes, regarding Intel's role:

"The big news in Cloudera's flurry of announcements is actually its partnership with Intel, which the company hopes will make Cloudera's Hadoop distribution the heart of the Big Data uprising. Intel used to have its own Hadoop distribution, but last week, Intel dumped its home-grown distribution to adopt Cloudera's. While $900 million is a lot of money, it pales in comparison to the mountains of cash both Cloudera and Intel expect to make through their partnership."

“The market opportunity for companies to gain insight and build transformative applications based on Hadoop is tremendous,” said Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, in a statement. “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.”

Market researchers at IDC have predicted the Big Data technology and services market will grow at a CAGR of 27% from 2012 to 2017, growing to $32.4 billion, and that the Internet of Things will generate 30 billion autonomously connected endpoints. Cloudera is betting on these outcomes, and clearly has big investors betting in tandem.