Intel Invests $740M in Cloudera, Apache Hadoop

Intel Corp (INTC) has invested approximately $740 million into Cloudera for an 18 percent share of the company, making it the Apache Hadoop-based data management startup’s largest shareholder.

This investment from Intel closes a $900 million financing round for Cloudera. The startup previously received $160 million in funding from T. Rowe Price, three other undisclosed public market investors, Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family.

Last week Cloudera and Intel unveiled their intentions of collaborating to enable customers to adopt big data solutions faster by joining Cloudera’s analytic data management software with Intel’s data center architecture. At the time of the joint announcement, the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Our partnership with Intel will accelerate a variety of technical improvements for Hadoop that we plan to work on jointly,” Cloudera Marketing Vice President Alan Saldich said. “The vast majority of those will be contributed back into the open source community, which will make Hadoop an even stronger choice for companies who want to build an enterprise data hub.”

Cloudera said the funding will be used to support its collaboration agreement with Intel, expand research and development, strengthen its relationship with partners, and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market.

The financing will also be used to support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia; expand services and support capabilities; and scale the company’s field and engineering organizations.

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly told Talkin’ Cloud that the companies will work together to establish a coordinated product, channel and sales program.

“This will include consolidating our partner relationships and extensive evangelism in the field,” he said. “Intel will not directly resell Cloudera to customers, but rather will reference sell and support Cloudera direct and indirect sales efforts.”

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