Private-equity firms KKR & Co. and Clayton Dubilier & Rice LLC agreed to buy Cloudera Inc. for roughly $5.3 billion in a deal that would take the software company private.

The pair on Tuesday said they would pay $16 a share for the data-cloud company, representing a roughly 24% premium to where the shares closed Friday.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the firms were close to a deal.

Founded in 2008 by a group of engineers from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc., Oracle Corp. and Yahoo Inc., Cloudera was an early player in the open-source software framework Hadoop, which enables large amounts of data to be processed quickly. But it struggled to shift to the now-dominant public cloud, where it faces steep competition from much larger firms including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services.

Cloudera’s shares have had a rocky run since their public-market debut in 2017. They are trading below their initial public offering price and are down roughly 8% this year.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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