Cloudera, the once high-profile Hadoop startup, has grown up 1 billion dollars and went public in 2018 before being acquired by private equity for $5.3 billion in 2021. Today, the company announced it is acquiring Verta, an artificial intelligence startup that helps customers manage machine learning models, including large language models used in genetic artificial intelligence.
Cloudera, which launched a SaaS data lakehouse the year after its acquisition, needed some pieces of artificial intelligence to stay relevant in today’s market. Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury certainly recognized this.
“The future of data management is artificial intelligence. they go hand in hand. Cloudera is acquiring Verta’s business AI platform to strengthen our team and accelerate our business AI capabilities,” he said in a statement.
As companies move more towards large language models, Verta has evolved from a task-based model management platform to one more oriented towards managing today’s large language models, acting as a control center for the models.
At a time when quality AI talent is hard to come by, this acquisition also gives Cloudera some top people to help run and expand their AI tools. That includes co-founders CEO Manasi Vartak, who cut her teeth at MIT CSAIL, and CTO Conrado Miranda, who was once the head of machine learning at Twitter.
Verta was founded in 2018 and raised nearly $16 million, per Pitchbook. This included a $10 million Series A in 2020. Vartak actually created the ModelDB open source project database as a way to track machine model releases while still in graduate school. He would later extend this concept to Verta.
Cloudera was born as a Hadoop startup in 2008, when companies were just beginning to think about how to process large amounts of data, and Hadoop, an open source project originally developed at Yahoo in 2005, was once the cutting edge. the. The problem was that by the time the company went public, there were simpler and cheaper ways to process that data, and Hadoop was losing steam.
At the same time, companies have moved much of their data workloads to the cloud, either the Big 3 cloud vendors – Amazon, Microsoft or Google – or startups like Snowflake and Databricks. Despite the name, for much of its existence, Cloudera’s solutions have actually been spot on.
The move to build a SaaS data lakehouse in 2021 was partly an attempt to compete with their cloud-native competitors. Since then, both Databricks and Snowflake have added AI capabilities both organically and through acquisition.
Today’s move is really about keeping up with the Joneses.
