Hadoop purveyor Hortonworks files IPO under JOBS Act
Hortonworks, an open source distributor of Apache Hadoop that has become somewhat of a darling in the enterprise IT world, filed for an initial public offering on Monday.
Details on the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is minimal, refraining to reveal the number of shares to be sold and the price range for the proposed offering likely until the IPO roadshow.
As demonstrated by other major recent tech IPOs, such as Twitter's IPO filing last September or the still pending Box debut, a company seeking to go public can file confidentially if it is valued at less than $1 billion, under the Jumpstart Our Businesses ACT, a.k.a. the JOBS act.
For now, Hortonworks announced Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities will act as joint lead book-running managers for the offering with RBC Capital Markets as book-running manager. Pacific Crest Securities, Wells Fargo Securities and Blackstone Capital Markets have been tapped as co-managers.
Hortonworks also offered a glimpse into its balance sheet. For the nine months ended September 30, 2013 and 2014, Hortonworks reported revenue of $15.9 million and $33.4 million, respectively. That's on top of net losses of $48.4 million and $86.7 million for the same time frames.
Founded in 2011, the business software vendor had raised upwards of $248 million in its last five funding rounds, according to the company's CrunchBase profile.
In that time, Hortonworks has attracted attention from many large tech stalwarts. In July, Hewlett-Packard boasted a $50 million investment as part of a broad integration pact aimed at big data analytics customers.
As noted on the S-1, Yahoo's investment portfolio extends beyond its highly-hyped interest in Alibaba. The technology company is the largest shareholder with 19.6 percent of Hortonworks shares, followed by Silicon Valley venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures with 18.7 percent and 9.5 percent respectively. Teradata owns 8.3 percent of shares and HP has 5.9 percent.
Hortonworks's enterprise platform was also established with help from "a core team of Hadoop developers and engineers" at Yahoo with the goal of expanding upon the early technology developed by Yahoo in Hadoop.
Product-wise, Hortonworks has collaborated on a slew of integrations in the last two years as Hadoop continues to pick up steam in managing massive amounts of big data. Those deals have included partnerships with EMC's Pivotal Initiative, BMC Software, Red Hat, and Accenture.
Hortonworks has also been scaling on its own through acquisitions, such as the purchase of one year old startup XA Secure in May for the purpose of developing a more comprehensive approach to Hadoop security.
As of September 30, 2014, Hortonworks affirmed it had 233 support subscription customers and 292 total customers "across a broad array of company sizes and industries," according to the S-1.