Big Data company Cloudera officially filed for its public offering last week, giving us a peek inside the startup’s business.
Cloudera offers a data management and analytics platform designed to provide companies with one place to store, process and analyze data. The company built its technology on Apache Hadoop, an open-source software that sorts massive amounts of information. Since its 2008 founding, Cloudera has raised $670 million in primary capital.
Cloudera
Below, we break down the Palo Alto-based company’s financials and ownership, as well as a few of the more interesting insights from the filing:
The basics
Cloudera will list on the NYSE under the ticker symbol CLDR.
The company is looking to raise $200 million in an IPO that would reportedly value it at $4.1 billion, which is equal to the valuation generated by its most recent financing in 2014.
Morgan Stanley is listed as the lead underwriter.
The numbers
Cloudera, which picks up most of its earnings through subscription sales, appears to be far from profitable—although the numbers are moving in the right direction, with revenues up and losses down.
The company recorded total revenue of $261 million for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2017, up from $166 million a year prior. At the same time, Cloudera posted a net loss of $187 million for the most recent fiscal year, down from $203 million for the same time period a year earlier.
From the filing: “We have a history of losses, and we may not become profitable in the future. We have incurred net losses since our founding in 2008.”
Most of Cloudera’s customers—about 500, which make up 73% of its total revenue—are enterprise businesses, with the public sector representing 10% of the company’s total revenue.
Ownership
Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly (right) owns 6.1% of the company, while co-founder, chief strategy officer and board chairman Mike Olson owns 4.4% and CFO Jim Frankola has a 1% stake.
Intel, which is closely affiliated with Cloudera in both funding and product development, has a 22% pre-IPO stake in the company. Early investors Accel and Greylock Partners own 16.3% and 12.5%, respectively.
Other investors include Meritech Capital Partners, GV, In-Q-Tel and Ignition Venture Partners, according to PitchBook data.
Other information
Back in 2014, Intel Capital invested $740 million in Cloudera. The SEC filing reveals that the two companies have a deeper relationship than simply one of investor-recipient. According to the document, Cloudera has “developed a strategic partnership with Intel to optimize [its] software for use with Intel processors and architecture.”
Cloudera built much of its business platform on open-source software, in combination with its own proprietary technology. In the filing, co-founder Mike Olson wrote “I understood the power and value of open source. I had also learned how hard it was to create and sustain a software company on just open source. When all your intellectual property is freely available to all your competitors, it’s hard to hold onto customers.” The “risk factors” section of the filing is made up largely of potential risks related to the company’s open-source software, including vulnerability to intellectual property lawsuits and the relatively low barrier to entry in the open-source market.
The company’s headcount rose nearly 30% over the last year, with 1,140 employees in January 2016 increasing to 1,470 employees a year later.
One of Cloudera’s main rivals is Hortonworks, a data management platform with similar offerings that raised $100 million in its 2014 IPO. Cloudera’s regulatory filing also lists several big-name public cloud providers as competitors, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
At the beginning of this year, Cloudera donated more than 1 million shares of its common stock to the Cloudera Foundation, a charitable nonprofit, which accounted for some of the company’s general and administrative expenses in the year ended January 31, 2017.
Cloudera is the latest in a line of tech companies that have filed for IPOs this year. Check out some of our previous IPO coverage right here.
Article by Dana Olsen, PitchBook
