Cloudera snags $65M to fuel European Big Data expansion

Cloudera has snagged $65 million in venture capital funding to keep up with rapid adoption of its Big Data offering. And the first stop is Europe, with Cloudera planning to open a headquarters in the U.K. by early next year.

The push into Europe comes as Silicon Valley-based Cloudera builds on a breakthrough year, in which execs claim that sales, headcount and customers all doubled. Signing up more than half of the Fortune 50 for its Hadoop-based Big Data services fueled the turbocharged rise, but Europe and life sciences will play a major role in maintaining growth.

Cloudera pushed into life sciences earlier this year through a genomics alliance with Mount Sinai Medical Center. And it is now moving into Europe to target companies across the pond. "We will be opening a London office in early 2013, with a view to establish and accelerate our European expansion plan. London is not only a gateway to Europe, but its access to both customers and IT talent is second to none," Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn said at Big Data Analytics 2012.

The expansion is backed by $65 million Cloudera raised in a fifth round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. AllThingsD--which broke the news--reports that the deal values Cloudera at $700 million. And the funding added to speculation about a potential IPO, which began to grow after Cloudera named former-IBM exec Jim Frankola as its CFO in October.

An IPO could fuel acquisitions to consolidate the potentially huge--but currently fragmented--Big Data market. In a deep dive into Big Data, Wikibon analysts predict a wave of consolidation over the next three to five years as the market matures. Cloudera currently faces competition from MapR, Yahoo spinoff Hortonworks and a range of smaller players working on the open source Hadoop framework.

- here's the AllThingsD scoop
- read TechWorld's U.K. expansion article
- see GigaOm's take
- check out the Wikibon analysis