Cloudera Makes a Comeback

Big Data vendor and Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) went public earlier this year. Earlier this summer, the company announced its first quarter results after it went public. But the earnings miss did not please the market and the stock fell nearly 30%. Tables appear to have turned with the second quarter as the company surpassed market expectations and the stock is back on the rise.

Cloudera’s Financials

For the second quarter of the year, Cloudera reported revenues of $89.8 million, recording a growth of 39% over the year. Net loss of $64.2 million, or 48 cents a share, improved from the loss of $1.07 a share a year ago. Adjusted losses came in at $0.17 per share compared with $0.29 reported last year. The market was forecasting revenues of $85.6 million and an adjusted loss of $0.25 per share for the quarter.

By segment, subscriptions revenues grew 46% to $74 million and accounted for 82% of total revenues. A year ago, subscription revenues contributed 79% share to the overall revenues and a quarter ago, its share stood at 81%. Services revenues grew 15% over the year to $15.8 million.

Going forward, the company expects revenues of $90-$92 million for the quarter and non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.25-$0.23. It expects to end the current year with revenues of $355-$360 million with a non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.95-$0.93 per share.

Cloudera’s Growth

Cloudera is hoping to drive these levels of growth through significant investments in expansion. Recently it announced the acquisition of New York-based Fast Forward Labs. Fast Forward Labs is a leading machine learning and applied AI research company founded by Hilary Mason, an expert in data science and machine learning. Cloudera plans to leverage the acquisition to build machine learning capabilities to solve real-world problems. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Besides machine learning, Cloudera is continuing to invest in its Cloudera Altus offering. Altus is a Platform-as-a-Service offering that enables data engineering and data science workloads to run natively in the public cloud. Cloudera handles deployment, management and operations, allowing its customers to focus on data processing and analytic work. Altus is allowing Cloudera to address elastic and transient jobs for customers that others would not have been practical to run in the data center. Cloudera plans to continue to grow this service to allow enterprises more flexibility to run workloads anywhere.

Rival Hortonworks (NASDAQ: HDP), which went public in 2014, was valued at $1.38 billion in its last private funding round before it went public. At the time of filing, it was valued at $592 million, but its successful IPO valued it at $1 billion. It is currently trading at $17 with market cap of $951 million. Its revenue in 2016 was $184.5 million with a net loss of $251.7 million.

The market is very pleased with Cloudera’s performance. Its first quarter results were a big disappointment earlier in the year and the stock had taken a beating, falling to a low of $15.40. Currently its stock is trading at $20.99 with a market capitalization of $2.75 billion. It had listed in April this year at $15 a share at a valuation of $2.3 billion and had touched a peak of $23.35 in June this year.

More investigation and analysis of Unicorn companies can be found in my latest Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns. The term Unicorn was coined in a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures.

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