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When will Cloudera go public?

By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
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By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
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March 19, 2014, 3:19 PM ET

FORTUNE — Cloudera, a Silicon Valley-based provider of enterprise analytic data management solutions that leverage Hadoop, announced yesterday afternoon that it has raised $160 million in new venture capital funding from T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures and MSD Capital (Michael Dell’s family office). This brings the company’s overall venture capitalization to over $300 million, and appears to set it up for an initial public offering.

Five quick notes on the deal, based on a conversation with Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly and CFO Jim Frankola:

1. Cloudera previously had raised around $140 million from such firms as Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, but none of the existing shareholders re-upped. Not because they didn’t want to, but because the newbies (namely T. Rowe) wanted as many shares as possible. Reminds me of what happened last week with the Eventbrite deal.

2. VCExperts found a Delaware filing that suggests a $1.8 billion valuation for the round, something that Tom Reilly is “in the right ballpark.”

3. Some proceeds may be used for acquisitions, but the immediate goal is to add headcount (particularly in for regional sales). The company currently has 540 employees, and is tracking toward 800 by year-end.

4. Speaking of year-end, it remains unclear if Cloudera will have filed for an IPO by then:

Reilly: “We’ll do it as soon as my CFO gets off QuickBooks.”

Frankola: (laughs) “We’re putting in new systems this year, and want to let them run for a few quarters. Our sales force is probably six times the size as it was a year ago, so we have lots of new people and new layers of management. So we want to let everyone have some time with this new set-up, to make sure everything is smooth. “

When I asked if that meant a 2015 IPO as opposed to a 2014 IPO, Frankola declined to be more specific.

5. Cloudera does not publicly discuss revenue, but does say that it has over 300 paying subscribers to its software service.

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By Dan Primack
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