Big data firm Cloudera raises US$65m and plans to open European HQ in London

7 Dec 2012

Cloudera, the Palo Alto, California, company that distributes Hadoop-based software to help companies analyse big data, has raised US$65m in a new funding round, while the company is planning to spread its wings to London, opening its European headquarters there.

According to a report on Techworld.com today, Cloudera is planning to open a European HQ in London in the first quarter of 2013, with the company’s chief operating officer Kirk Dunn announcing the move at a big data analytics conference held in London yesterday.

Cloudera was co-founded in 2008 by Mike Olson (CEO), a former Oracle executive, plus three engineers: Jeff Hammerbacher, who came from Facebook; Amr Awadallah, who came from Accel Partners and before that Yahoo!; and Christophe Bisciglia, who came from Google. Bisciglia has since left Cloudera.

The company’s business is based on the commercialisation of Hadoop, the open-source software that aggregates results from large data sets from different sources.

Cloudera raised the US$65m in a funding round that was led by Accel Partners, followed by Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners – all existing backers. To date, Cloudera has raised about US$140m.

The company is planning to leverage the latest funding to focus on its global sales growth and to develop its big data platform. Cloudera now has more than 400 partners and more than 50 certified technologies and 15 certified connectors.

Its customer base includes companies such as AOL, eBay, Expedia, Experian, Nokia, RIM, and The Walt Disney Company.

“Big data continues to fuel significant new business opportunities and revenue streams for our enterprise customers, spurring the need for new, large-scale data management solutions that can meet the needs of today’s demanding enterprise workloads,” said Cloudera’s Olson in a statement.

He said the company’s mission is to “shape” and “define” the next generation of big data-management solutions for the enterprise.

Big data image via Shutterstock

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

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