Cloudera's valuation slashed by Fidelity amid IPO fail fears

Cloudera's estimated valuation was slashed 38 per cent by major capital player Fidelity Investments, reports have said, as Wall Street grows very cool on unicorn public offerings.

Fidelity aired its concerns about a potential "startup bubble" by marking down its assessment of privately held Cloudera, monthly holding reports published on Wednesday suggested.

The drop in Cloudera's estimated valuation will be noted in Silicon Valley, where investors have been expecting the company to announce its Initial Public Offering for close to a year.

Last December, Will Danoff, of Fidelity Investments' $100bn pensions arm Contrafund – said that the astronomical valuations around certain Silicon Valley companies were unrealistic, and warned that bust was coming after several years of boom.

Against the dropping value of shares in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Salesforce, Fidelity also marked down the value of its stake in Dropbox by almost 20 per cent. Nutanix, Delphix, Cloudflare and Appirio also had their value written down.

However, as the Financial Times noted, these dropping valuations have had "little impact on capital flows to venture capital groups. Preliminary data from Dow Jones VentureSource shows that US venture capital companies have raised more money in the first quarter of this year than in any quarter since the dotcom bubble." ®