Cloudera snatches a massive $160M to lead the business of big data

Wowzers. Bloomberg’s report about big data company Cloudera raising big money was no joke.

Today, Cloudera announced a heavy-duty $160 million round of funding. T. Rowe Price led the round, alongside money from “three other top-tier public market investors,” Google Ventures, and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P. (Michael Dell’s family firm), according to a press release.

Cloudera pulls in revenue by selling commercial support for the Hadoop ecosystem of open-source software for storing and processing lots of different kinds of data. Hadoop has become popular among web-scale businesses, startups, and some enterprises as a supplement (or sometimes as an alternative) to traditional databases and data warehouses.

While Cloudera shares the Hadoop distribution market with large tech companies like Intel and EMC-VMware spinout Pivotal, as well as more focused vendors like Hortonworks and MapR, analysts view Cloudera as a leader in the market.

With fresh funds, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cloudera plans to push its software into more enterprise IT shops, and it will focus more on Europe and Asia.

The company last announced a $65 million round of funding in December 2012. Including today’s announcement, the company has taken on $300 million.

Cloudera could go public as soon as this year.

In recent months, tech companies big and small have signed partnerships to work alongside Cloudera.

Data-transformation startup Trifacta holds the title for most recent Cloudera collaborator, as the two companies are now working together on development and certification. But public clouds like Amazon Web Services and IBM have also hit up Cloudera to bring its Hadoop distribution to their portfolios.