Cloudera, once a high-flying Hadoop startup, raises $1 billion $1 billion and went away Public in 2018 before being acquired by private equity in 2021 for $5.3 billionToday, the company announced it is acquiring Virta, an AI startup that helps customers manage machine learning models, including large language models used in generative AI.
Cloudera, which launched A SaaS data lakehouse Just a year after being acquired, Cloudera needed some AI to stay relevant in today’s market. Cloudera CEO Charles Sainsbury certainly recognized this.
“The future of data management is AI; they go hand in hand with each other. Cloudera is acquiring Virta’s operational AI platform to strengthen our team and enhance our operational AI capabilities,” he said in a statement.
As companies move toward larger language models, Virta has evolved from a task-based model management platform to a more capable platform for managing today’s large language models, acting as a control center for models.
At a time when quality AI talent is hard to find, the acquisition also gives Cloudera some great people to help it run and expand its AI tooling. This includes co-founder CEO Manasi Vartak, who worked at MIT CSAIL, and CTO Conrado Miranda, who was once a machine learning lead at Twitter.
Varta was founded in 2018 and has raised around $16 million, According to Pitchbook. This includes $10 million Series A in 2020. Vartak actually created the open-source project ModelDB database, a way to track versions of machine models, while she was still in graduate school. She later expanded that idea into Varta.
Cloudera was born as a Hadoop startup in 2008 at a time when companies were thinking about how to process massive amounts of data, and Hadoop, an open source project originally developed at Yahoo in 2005, was once the cutting-edge way to do it. The problem was that by the time the company went public, there were simpler and more cost-effective ways to process that data, and Hadoop’s popularity was waning.
At the same time, companies were moving more of their data workloads to the cloud, whether it was the big three cloud vendors – Amazon, Microsoft or Google – or startups like Snowflake and Databricks. Despite the name, for most of its existence, Cloudera’s solutions were actually on-prem.
The move to build a SaaS data lakehouse in 2021 was partly an attempt to compete with its cloud native competitors. Since then both Databricks and Snowflake have added AI capabilities organically and through acquisitions.
Today’s move is really about keeping up with the Joneses.
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