There could be another big technology IPO in 2017.
Cloudera, a data analytics startup, has filed to go public and will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CLDR. The Palo Alto-based company is a member of Coins2Day’s Unicorn List, which tracks startups with reported valuations of more than $1 billion.
Technology analysts have credited Cloudera, founded in 2008, as one of the pioneers in popularizing big data technologies like Hadoop, which companies use to store and process massive amounts of data across thousands of computers.
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However, Cloudera faces tough competition in the data analytics market and cites in its filing several high-profile rivals, including Amazon Web Services (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Oracle (ORCL).
One of its rivals, Hortonworks (HDP), went public in late 2014 with its shares trading at nearly $28 during its height in April 2015. However, Hortonworks’ shares have dropped over 60% to $9.90 on Friday as the company has struggled to be profitable.
Like Hortonworks, Cloudera is not yet profitable, and it acknowledges in its filing that it may never be as it has a “history of losses.” Cloudera recorded $261 million in sales for its most recent fiscal year while also losing $187 million during the same time period.
Cloudera goes from Utterly Insane Losses to Super High Losses before IPO
Still, should crush it pic.twitter.com/laFCiuCJ9D
— Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin 🇮🇱 (@jasonlk) March 31, 2017
Both Cloudera and Hortonworks are examples of companies trying to make a viable business around open source technologies, an industry term for hardware and software free for companies to use and modify without charge. Whereas Hortonworks concentrates on consulting services to help businesses use the open source Hadoop data tech, Cloudera focuses on selling proprietary technology to manage and operate large corporate software projects that use Hadoop.
Some of Cloudera’s biggest customers include telecommunications company BT Group, Citigroup, and business services giant Experian.
The startup’s last big round of funding came in March 2014 when Intel (INTC) led a $740 million investment, according to the investment-tracking site CrunchBase. Cloudera is closely affiliated with Intel, which owns 22% of the company, and partnered with the semiconductor giant on several big technology projects, according to the filing.
Accel Partners was Cloudera’s first investor and owns 16.3% of the company, followed by Greylock Partners, which owns 12.5% of Cloudera’s shares prior to the IPO, the filing shows.
As of January 31, Cloudera had over 1,470 full-time employees.
Earlier in March, another enterprise software startup Okta filed to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. If Cloudera and Okta debut on Wall Street this year, they would join the ranks of IT software company Mulesoft and data crunching specialist Alteryx, which both recently went public.
