In preparation for its initial public offering (IPO), big data analytics firm Cloudera yesterday priced its offering at $12 to $14 per share, giving the company a market capitalization of $1.79 billion. The company is planning to sell 17.3 million shares and could possibly raise as much as $242.2 million from the offering.

Cloudera filed an S1 document earlier this month in which it said that its revenue at the end of fiscal year 2017, which ended January 31, was $261 million, a 57% increase from $166 million in revenue that it reported during the prior fiscal year. In addition, net losses declined from $203.1 million at the end of fiscal 2016 to $187.3 million at the end of fiscal 2017.

The company claims it has 500 of the global 8,000 corporate enterprises using its platform. Those companies represent 73% of Cloudera’s total revenue. The public sector customers present about 10% of total revenue.

Cloudera was founded in 2008 and helped pioneer the market for Hadoop, an open-source, distributed database system designed for interpreting large amounts of data. Cloudera’s platform uses both open source software combined with the company’s proprietary software to help companies manage and move workloads across multiple architectures.

The company says its platform integrates 26 different open source projects, and that 18 of those projects were created by its engineers. Cloudera touts its involvement in open source projects for helping it recognize and champion emerging standards, as it did with Spark, which is an open source project and an alternative to MapReduce, the engine that powers Hadoop.

Cloudera works with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as well as managed service providers. Earlier this year, CenturyLink launched a big data-as-a-service using Cloudera’s managed service platform. The telco said it planned to use the service to help companies rapidly analyze large and complex data sets.

Intel investment

In 2014, Intel invested about $740 million in Cloudera. In the S1 filing, Cloudera said that Intel will own about 19.4 percent of the company and may want to acquire up to 10 percent of the IPO shares, which would increase its ownership.

Cloudera considers HPE, IBM, Oracle, and Teradata to be its biggest competitors, but added that it also competes with the big public cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google.