In a remarkable turn of events, Cloudera, a Hadoop startup that had soared to great heights, successfully secured $1 billion in funding and made its debut on the stock market in 2018. However, in 2021, a private equity firm unexpectedly acquired the company for a staggering $5.3 billion. Today, the company announced its acquisition of Verta, an AI startup that specialises in helping customers manage machine learning models, including large language models (LLMs) used in generative AI.
Shortly after its acquisition, Cloudera introduced a SaaS data lakehouse, recognising the need for AI expertise to stay competitive in the market. Charles Sansbury, the CEO of the company, made this clear.
AI and data management will play a significant role in the future. Cloudera is acquiring Verta’s operational AI platform to enhance our team and expedite our operational AI capabilities,” he stated.
With the shift towards LLMs, Verta has transformed from a task-based model management platform to a comprehensive control centre for managing large language models in today’s dynamic business landscape. 
In an era where finding skilled AI professionals is challenging, this acquisition provides Cloudera with a team of exceptional individuals who can effectively manage and enhance their AI tooling. That includes co-founder CEO Manasi Vartak, who gained experience at MIT CSAIL, and CTO Conrado Miranda, who previously held the position of machine learning lead at Twitter.
According to PitchBook, Verta, an established company in 2018, successfully secured an impressive funding of nearly $16 million. The company secured a $10 million Series A in 2020. Vartak created the open-source project ModelDB database during her graduate school years to keep track of machine model versions. She later developed that idea in Verta.
Cloudera emerged as a Hadoop startup in 2008, during a time when companies were exploring ways to handle massive data volumes. At that time, Yahoo created Hadoop, an open-source project, as the go-to solution for processing such data. Unfortunately, when the company went public, there were more efficient and affordable methods available to handle that data, causing Hadoop to lose its popularity.
Simultaneously, companies were transitioning a significant portion of their data workloads to the cloud, whether it be through established cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, or through emerging startups like Snowflake and Databricks. Contrary to its name, Cloudera’s solutions primarily operated on-premises for a significant portion of its history.
The desire to stay competitive with cloud-native rivals partly drove the decision to create a SaaS data lakehouse in 2021. Since then, Databricks and Snowflake have incorporated AI capabilities through both internal development and strategic acquisitions.
Today’s decision is really about staying competitive.
