Cloudera Nets $40 Million in Series D Funding

Ahead of its Hadoop World 2011 conference in New York City, Cloudera Inc., the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, today announced it has closed a $40 million Series D funding round led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners and joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel.

To support growth and momentum in the marketplace, Cloudera will use the funds to further expand its marketing and sales operations, and support strategic initiatives.

Used by some of the world’s leading social media and ecommerce companies, including eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Apache Hadoop is an open source technology that addresses the economic, flexibility and scalability issues surrounding massive data growth in the enterprise. As the first company to make Hadoop an enterprise-ready solution, Cloudera is the  provider of Apache Hadoop-based software, training and support services that enable data driven enterprises to easily derive business value and actionable insights from structured and unstructured datasets.

"Cloudera is the defining company in the Big Data industry and the popularity of Hadoop is increasing every day. The Big Data space is moving fast – we looked at many investment opportunities and chose Cloudera due to their clear leadership. The team and its technology are the best in this business and we are excited to be part of it. Given our firm’s deep domain expertise in building platforms at scale, we are uniquely qualified to provide support as this expansion takes place," said Artale. "Our expertise complements the long-term goals of Cloudera, specifically as the company accelerates both independent software vendors and enterprise adoption of the platform."

Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) is the most widely deployed Hadoop distribution in both commercial and non-commercial environments and is open source Apache Hadoop bundled with other Apache projects in the Hadoop stack to make it easier for enterprises to deploy and use. Cloudera Enterprise is the company’s subscription-based software offering, which includes the Cloudera Management Suite, for operating Hadoop clusters at scale in demanding production deployments. Cloudera pioneered the development of an official curriculum from which to train and certify developers and system administrators on Apache Hadoop. Since 2009, Cloudera has trained more than 7,000 students on Hadoop. Its Cloudera University training courses, which leverage real-world enterprise use cases for Apache Hadoop and other open source technologies in the Hadoop stack, offers both public classes and private courses for commercial organizations.

"This investment validates the success and innovation that Cloudera has achieved to date and the enormous market opportunity for Big Data managed by Hadoop," said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. "Ignition is led by a seasoned team of enterprise software executives with proven expertise in building some of the most broadly deployed software platforms in the world, which is why we selected them to lead this round. We are confident that by working closely together, we will continue to accelerate Cloudera’s leadership in the space and deliver game-changing technology. We are excited to have an experienced team of investors that have actually built and rolled out world class software platforms as our trusted advisors."