From Prague to the Cloud: Celebrating the Exit of Taikun to Cloudera
On August 4, 2025, Cloudera announced its acquisition of Taikun Cloud, a Czech-born innovator in Kubernetes and multi-cloud orchestration. This is more than just a tech M&A headline — it’s a testament to how deep engineering talent, paired with bold vision and the right partners, can scale local innovation to global relevance.
At Gi21 Capital, we had the privilege of supporting Taikun early on. From day one, it was clear that the team led by Adam Skotnicky wasn’t just building another DevOps tool — they were solving one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges enterprises face today: managing data and AI workloads across hybrid, multi-cloud, and regulated environments with consistency and control.
Why This Exit Matters
Cloudera, long known for bringing the data and AI platform “anywhere”, is on a strategic acquisition streak — Taikun marks their third acquisition in just 14 months, following Verta (operational AI) and Octopai (data lineage/catalog). With Taikun, Cloudera gains not just software, but a container-native compute layer that unlocks a cloud-like experience anywhere enterprise data lives — even in air-gapped, sovereign, or regulated environments.
For CIOs wrestling with fragmented infrastructure and mounting AI complexity, this acquisition is a move toward simplicity, efficiency, and control.
But there’s another layer to the story.
The Czech Republic as a Cloud Innovation Hub
As part of the acquisition, Cloudera will turn Taikun’s Prague operations into its new European development hub — a huge win for the regional tech ecosystem. It validates the depth of technical talent in Central Europe and confirms that the Czech Republic is not just producing startups — but exporting core infrastructure to the world’s biggest data platforms.
Our Role at Gi21
At Gi21 Capital, we’ve always believed in supporting the kind of founders who don’t wait for permission to build globally impactful companies. Taikun is a perfect example of this.
From their first deployments in heavily regulated industries to their success in enabling complex enterprise workloads, we saw a team that was technically excellent and commercially grounded. Their ability to navigate the worlds of DevOps, AI, compliance, and cloud — all while staying lean and globally relevant — is exactly what we look for.
We’re proud to have been part of this chapter and even prouder to see them continue to grow under the Cloudera banner.
What’s Next
As enterprises increasingly demand flexible, cloud-native data infrastructure, we believe this exit signals a broader shift: from single-cloud dependencies to true cloud autonomy. With players like Taikun paving the way, the future of enterprise data management looks much more distributed — and much more intelligent.
To Adam, the entire Taikun team, and our co-investors — thank you. Here’s to building what’s next.
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Gi21 Capital
Backing bold. Building global.
