Hadoop-based startup Cloudera nabs a massive $65M funding round

Cloudera has pulled in $65 million in its fifth round of venture capital funding, bringing the company’s total funds to $140 million.

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The Silicon Valley company was among the first to commercialize Hadoop, the open source computing framework that makes it easier for large corporations to manage large volumes of data that cannot be stored in a traditional database. In recent years, Hadoop has become synonymous with the term “big data”.

AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl originally reported the story, but did not cite the source. The round was announced at a closed meeting of Cloudera execs at its Palo Alto headquarters led by CEO Mike Olson. According to AllThingsD, this deal values Cloudera at about $700 million, which puts it in strong position as the company edges toward an initial public offering.

Cloudera has not yet made a formal announcement about the funding.

The company was started in 2008 by three engineers from Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher led the team of data scientists at Facebook, and was one of the first to utilize Hadoop to deal with vast quantities of consumer data. Hammerbacher realized that companies of all sizes would need a better way to manage their data, but most of them would not have a data services team on staff.

“He [Hammerbacher] saw the big data pain at Facebook [and] he joined with Mike Olson to explore the potential of Hadoop,” said Accel Partners’ Ping Li in a recent interview. “They realized it was much more a broader problem than just Facebook,” he said.

Accel Partners, the venture capital firm with a $100 million fund dedicated to big data startups, led this series E round. The firm also invested $5 million in the company’s first round in 2009. Cloudera’s all-star cast of investors include Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners.