Cloudera to be taken private after $5.3 billion cash deal.

Cloudera is to be taken private, with two private equity firms agreeing to buy the enterprise data wrangler for $5.3 billion in an all-cash deal -- three years after Cloudera agreed a $5.2 billion billion merger with rival Hortonworks and after several bumpy years for the company, post-merger.

Affiliates of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (“CD&R”) and KKR are taking on the company -- which started as a Hadoop specialist and has gone on to launch an integrated "Cloud Data Platform" in an all-cash deal, they said on June 1.

Cloudera offers software subscriptions and public cloud services for its CDP solution-set and software subscriptions for its traditional on-premises data platforms, along with consultation, training and education services. (The CDP offers SQL analytics, real-time stream processing and data management built on Spark, Impala, Hive, HBase, Kafka, Hadoop, et al). As of January 31, 2021, it had 2,728 full-time employees.

Cloudera has incurred net losses since its founding in 2008, including net losses of $162.7 million, $336.6 million and $192.6 million for the years ended January 31, 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. As per SEC filings, it had an accumulated deficit of $1.6 billion as of January 31, 2021.

Going private will give Cloudera more flexibility and resources, President Mick Hollison said, claiming that "everyone from Snowflake and DataBricks to Google and Microsoft claim to have [an integrated data platform] but the truth is that we are leading the way in the hybrid data cloud space."

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Cloudera simultaneously announced plans to acquire a pair of SaaS companies, Datacoral and Cazena, as the company aims to deepen its capabilities. Hollison added: "We believe these acquisitions will accelerate our public cloud roadmap and expand our market opportunity. This is an important milestone in Cloudera’s history, as we move beyond big data and 'self-managed' services. These acquisitions usher in a new era of 'self-service' by automating complex operations so customers can focus on building great data-driven apps instead of managing infrastructure."

Cloudera shareholders will receive $16.00 in cash per share, a 24% premium to the closing price as of May 28, 2021 and a 30% premium to the 30-day volume weighted average share price: "This transaction provides substantial and certain value to our shareholders while also accelerating Cloudera’s long-term path to hybrid cloud leadership for analytics that span the complete data lifecycle - from the Edge to AI,” said CEO Rob Bearden.

He added in a canned statement: “We believe that as a private company with the expertise and support of experienced investors such as CD&R and KKR, Cloudera will have the resources and flexibility to drive product-led growth and expand our addressable market opportunity."

“We very much look forward to working with Cloudera as it continues to execute its long-term transformation strategy,” said Jeff Hawn, CD&R Operating Partner, who will serve as Chairman of the company upon the close of the transaction. “The company has made significant progress establishing the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) as a leader in hybrid and multi-cloud analytics, and we believe that our experience and capabilities can offer valuable support to accelerate expansion into new products and markets.”