Liquidity

Morning Report: Understanding MapR’s Big Hadoop Raise

Morning Report: MapR raises $56 million more. What can we understand about the Hadoop shops market position given public competition? Let’s find out.

One of this week’s larger capital raises is a new $56 million block put into MapR, a big data and analytics shop that works with Hadoop. The scale of capital raised in the round is not new to MapR, a company that had raised around $200 million before, including an $80 million Series D in 2014. (2014 was, in some ways, one of the unicorn cycle’s silliest years.)

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Of course, the new capital will allow MapR to delay an IPO—something that the Silicon Valley Business Journal made clear in its coverage of the round. Indeed, its piece quotes the MapR CEO as saying that an IPO will happen “when things are right.” Translating from CEO to human, that quip roughly works out to “piss off, I just raised $56 million.”

But IPOs and public action are on the mind when it comes to MapR. After all, that $250 million has to become liquid at some point, and, notably, MapR has two already-public comps for us to unspool: Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Each of these firms would probably carp that they don’t form perfect cognates with the other two companies, but we have no intention of listening to such whining. In that spirit, let’s unpack the competition.

Hortonworks And Cloudera

Hortonworks was the first Hadoop concern to go public. Its IPO was a smashing success in terms of first-day performance. As I wrote for TechCrunch in December of 2014, the company spiked more than 40 percent in its public market debut. But the company went downhill from there.

Shares of Hortonworks fell from the mid-to-high twenties to the single digits through most of 2016 and 2017. The company’s shares have since recovered to the upper-teens, besting its IPO price once again.

Cloudera, on the other hand, is a recent debut. As Crunchbase News reported, the company took a massive valuation cut to go public:

Cloudera, an enterprise-facing Hadoop shop, set its proposed IPO share price range at $12 to $14 this week. At $14 per share, the company will raise over $240 million and secure a valuation of $1.79 billion, according to variouspubliccalculations.

That a unicorn is about to debut in the public markets and raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the process may sound encouraging, but in this case, there is more shadow than sun. Cloudera was valued at more than $4 billion in 2014 when Intel invested $740 million into the company. Cloudera’s IPO valuation is likely to land under half of its prior private valuation. That’s steep.

The firm priced above-range at $15 and now trades for more than $20, putting Cloudera’s worth at about $2.7 billion. Its a success for early investors; however, it’s a lacking figure compared to its prior heights.

And that explains why MapR likely raised its new cash from private sources instead of public investors. Here’s Forbes’ Alex Konrad on the MapR round regarding the valuation attached to the round:

MapR didn’t disclose its valuation, but the round was at a higher value than its previous, says [CEO Matt] Mills. MapR had been previously valued at about $500 million, according to data from PitchBook. That round had actually dipped its price tag, what’s known as a down round, as the company had first looked to go public. But it put those plans on hold under Mills, who took over as CEO from cofounder John Schroeder in September 2016. With new leadership, MapR achieved 100% billings growth in new subscription billings in the second quarter, on pace for 70% annually.

It sounds like MapR is going through the multiples compression that many recently-public SaaS companies have had to endure. We can understand that as MapR has been growing, presumably, at a good clip in recent years while its valuation growth has slowed. That implies a shrinking price-sales multiple.

Now that’s a recipe for going public. We’ll see how MapR does over the next few quarters. With its new cash, I doubt we’ll see an S-1 anytime soon. But if Cloudera and Hortonworks keep gaining altitude from their IPO prices, perhaps MapR will try to join the duo sooner than we might have thought.

From The Crunchbase Daily:

Fanatics raises $1B from SoftBank

  • Online sports merchandiser Fanatics has closed a $1 billion SoftBank-led funding round, Reuters reports. Much of the new financing, which values the Jacksonville-based company at $4.5 billion, will go to international expansion.

23andMe eyeing $200M fundraise

  • Genetic testing and analysis provider 23andMe is raising $200 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, according to a TechCrunch reportciting people close to the company. The ten-year-old, Silicon Valley company has previously raised more than $230 million.

Turo raises $92M for car sharing

  • Turo, a service for car owners to rent their vehicles, announced that it has raised $92 million in a Series D funding round led by Germany’s Daimler and South Korea’s SK Holdings. As part of the deal, San Francisco-based Turo will acquire Daimler-owned Croove, a German peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace.

How early stage funding works

  • Seed and early stage funding terms are weird and complicated. To help walk would-be founders through a typical fundraising process, Crunchbase News has created a fictitious startup, chicken drone delivery service Internet of Wings, that is looking to scale. Read about it here.

Join us at Disrupt SF

  • We’re inviting investors for a no-holds-barred chat with Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this September. Get your special $500 discount for being a Crunchbase subscriber.

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