Cloudera Invests in AI by Purchasing Verta AI Startup

Through the recent acquisition of Verta, a Machine Learning management Startup AI company, Cloudera invests in AI to provide more services to users.

Once a leading Hadoop startup, Cloudera went public in 2018 and raised $1 billion before its acquisition by private equity for $5.3 billion in 2021. Today, the organization intends to procure Verta, an AI startup that administers machine learning models, such as the substantial language models employed in generative AI.

Cloudera, which introduced a SaaS data lakehouse one year following its acquisition, required AI capabilities to remain competitive in the current market. Undoubtedly, Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury was aware of this.

“AI is the future of data management; the two are inextricably linked.” He said that Cloudera is acquiring Verta’s Operational AI platform “to strengthen our team and accelerate our operational AI capabilities.”

Verta transformed a task-based model management platform to one more specifically designed to manage the large language models that organizations are increasingly adopting; it now functions as the models’ control center.

Amidst the current scarcity of high-caliber AI personnel, this acquisition provides Cloudera with some exceptional individuals to assist in operating and expanding their AI tools. This includes co-founders Manasi Vartak, who received her MBA from MIT CSAIL, and Conrado Miranda, who formerly oversaw machine learning at Twitter and is now the CTO.

Per Pitchbook, Verta was established in 2018 and has raised nearly $16 million. In 2020, this included a $10 million Series A. While in graduate school, Vartak developed the open-source ModelDB database to track machine model versions. She would subsequently develop that concept into Verta.

In 2008, when organizations began to consider how to process massive amounts of data and Hadoop, an open source project that Yahoo had developed in 2005, was the bleeding edge solution, Cloudera was founded as a Hadoop startup. Hadoop lost momentum when the company went public when more straightforward and cost-effective alternatives emerged for processing that data.

Concurrently, businesses migrated a substantial portion of their data operations to the cloud, utilizing services from the prominent three cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, or Google) or upstarts (Snowflake and Databricks). Throughout a significant portion of its existence, Cloudera’s solutions were, notwithstanding their moniker, implemented locally.

The construction of a SaaS data lakehouse in 2021 was motivated, in part, by the desire to remain competitive with cloud-native rivals. After that, Snowflake and Databricks expanded their AI capabilities through organic growth and acquisitions.

In essence, today’s action aims to maintain pace with the Joneses.