There has been a flurry of IPO activity over the last few weeks with more than seven companies joining the IPO pipeline. Among them is Billion Dollar Unicorn player Cloudera. 

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Cloudera’s Journey

Palo Alto-based Big Data vendor Cloudera was founded in 2008 by engineers Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah, and Jeff Hammerbacher together with Oracle executive Mike Olson to leverage the power of Hadoop. It released its first product in 2009 and today has the leading Big Data platform for data management, machine learning, and advanced analytics.

Cloudera became one of the first companies to commercialize Apache Hadoop and to develop solutions for enterprises built on this open source technology. Its software platform combines the open source software with proprietary software to meet the requirements of large enterprises. It has more than 1,000 large enterprise customers in more than 45 countries, as well as the governments of 29 countries. Customers include BT Group, Citigroup Global Markets, Experian, and Navistar International.

Last year, it acquired Sense, a startup that built a cloud service enabling multiple data scientists to collaborate and share self-service analytics reports. Previous Cloudera acquisitions include DataPad and Xplain.io.

Cloudera’s Financials

Revenue was $166 million in 2015 and grew 57% to $261 million in 2016. Over the same period, operating cash outflows increased from $90.5 million to $116.6 million. Net losses decreased from $203.1 million in 2015 to $187.3 million in 2016. Cloudera had over 1,470 full-time employees in 2016, up from 1,140 in 2015.

Subscriptions account for about 72% of its revenues, up from about 67% in 2015. Services account for the remaining 28% of revenues. Enterprise customers accounted for 73% of revenue in 2016.

Within operating expenses of $295.3 million in 2016, sales and marketing account for the lion’s share at $161.6 million and research and development accounts for $99.3 million. It ended fiscal 2016 with total assets of $442.5 million including cash and cash equivalents of $74.2 million.