Cloudera used this pitch deck to take home $5m in series A money in 2009

ABOUT

Cloudera is a US-based software firm that provides an enterprise data cloud platform for data engineering, machine learning, and analytics that runs locally or on the cloud.

It started off in 2008 by giving companies one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data. Now, it also helps enterprises across all industries transform complex data into actionable insights in a single platform.

Cloudera also provides services for companies to manage and secure their entire data lifecycle in any cloud or data center.

The company used this pitch deck to take home US$5 million in series A money from a round led by Accel Partners. Since then, Cloudera has raised over US$1 billion before going public in 2017.

Fundraising journey

• March 2009: US$5 million series A led by Accel Partners and participated by Mike Abbott (senior vice president, Palm), David desJardins (early Google employee), Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr), David Gerster (entrepreneur), Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Youssri Helmy (entrepreneur), Dr. Qi Lu (president of the Online Services Group, Microsoft; former executive vice president, Yahoo!), Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL), In Sik Rhee (former chief tactician, Opsware; founder, Loudcloud), Mendel Rosenblum (founder VMware), Jeff Weiner (president, LinkedIn; former senior vice president, Yahoo!), Dick Williams (CEO, Illustra; former CEO, Wily Technology), Gideon Yu (Facebook CFO; former senior vice president, Yahoo!; CFO, YouTube).
• June 2009: US$6 million series B led by Greylock Partners and participated by Accel Partners.
• 2010: US$25 million series C led by Meritech Capital Partners, participated by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.
• 2011: US$40 million series D led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners and participated by Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel.
• 2012: US$65 million of series E led by Accel Partners and participated by Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and Meritech Capital Partners.
• 2014: a total of US$900 million of institutional and strategic investors in 2 rounds led by T. Rowe Price, participated by Google Ventures, an affiliate of MSD Capital (the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family), and Intel.

How is the deck compelling?

• Hadoop was still a new technology at that time, so the deck contains more theoretical stuff of Hadoop proved by data. This is what might have appealed to Accel Partners – as an investment company that focuses on high technology sectors including computing and storage infrastructure – and the other angel investors that participated in the round.
• Stating the problems and offering solutions on the storage system.
• Elaborates on how Cloudera will make use of the Hadoop technology in building its solutions and business.

SOURCE

Deck: PitchDeckHunt