Cloudera, Inc. was formed on June 27, 2008 in
Burlingame, California by
Christophe Bisciglia,
Amr Awadallah,
Jeff Hammerbacher, and chief executive Mike Olson. Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia, Awadallah, and Hammerbacher were engineers at
Google,
Yahoo!, and
Facebook respectively, The four were joined in 2009 by
Doug Cutting, a co-founder of Hadoop. Cloudera originally offered a free product based on
Hadoop, earning revenue by selling support and consulting services around it. In 2009 the company received a $5 million investment led by
Accel Partners. This was followed by a $25 million funding round in October 2010 and a $40M funding round in November 2011. In June 2013, Olson transitioned from CEO to Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategy Officer. Tom Reilly, former CEO of
ArcSight, was appointed CEO. In March 2014, Cloudera raised another $160 million in funding from
T. Rowe Price and other investors.
Intel invested $740 million in Cloudera for an 18% stake in the company (a $4.1 billion company valuation). These shares were repurchased by Cloudera in December 2020 for $314 million. On April 28, 2017, the company became a
public company via an
initial public offering. Over the next four years, the company's share price declined in the wake of falling sales figures and competition from public cloud services like
Amazon Web Services. which the two companies completed the following January. Five months later, CEO Reilly and founder Olson left the company in June 2019. Board member Martin Cole was appointed as temporary CEO. In January 2020, former Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden was appointed as Cloudera's CEO. In October 2021, the company went private after an acquisition by
KKR and
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in an all cash transaction valued at approximately $5.3 billion. In October 2023, R2 Solutions LLC filed a civil complaint against Cloudera in the
United States District Court for the Western District of Texas for
patent infringement. That same month, StreamScale won a $240 million jury verdict against Cloudera for patent infringement. In June 2024, Cloudera acquired Verta, an AI startup specializing in managing large language models. This followed Cloudera's launch of a SaaS data lakehouse and was positioned as a way to strengthen operational AI capabilities. ==Products and services==