Hortonworks is a big data software company based in Santa Clara, California. The company develops and supports Apache Hadoop, for the distributed processing of large data sets across computer clusters.

Hortonworks was formed in June 2011 as an independent company, funded by $23 million venture capital from Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. Its first office was in Sunnyvale, California. The company employs contributors to the open source software project Apache Hadoop. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) product includes Apache Hadoop and is used for storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform is designed to deal with data from many sources and formats. The platform includes Hadoop technology such as the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, ZooKeeper, and additional components.

Eric Baldeschweiler (from Yahoo) was initial chief executive, and Rob Bearden chief operating officer, formerly from SpringSource. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton was a board member.The company name refers to the character Horton the Elephant, since the elephant is the symbol for Hadoop. Additional investors included a $25 million round led by Index Ventures in November 2011.

In October 2011 Hortonworks announced Microsoft would collaborate on a Hadoop distribution for Microsoft Azure and Windows Server. On February 25, 2013, Hortonworks announced availability of a beta version of the Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows. In November 2011 it announced HParser software from Informatica would be available for free download by its customers.

In February 2012 Teradata announced an alliance. In October 2012 Teradata's Aster Data Systems division announced an appliance supporting Hortonworks' distribution, and Impetus Technologies announced a partnership.

In June 2013 Hortonworks announced another $50 million in financing, from previous investors and adding Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group. In September 2013 SAP AG announced it would resell the Hortonworks distribution (as well as one from Intel). By the end of 2013, Bearden, who had become chief executive by 2012, denied rumors the company would soon go public or be acquired.

In March 2014, another $100 million investment was announced, led by BlackRock and passport capital. In May 2014, Hortonworks acquired XA Secure, a small data security company founded in January 2013, for undisclosed terms. The company used a provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act to avoid disclosing registration forms with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2014. The filings showed about $37 million lost in 2013, and $87 million in the first half of 2014. In December 2014, Hortonworks had their initial public offering, listed on the NASDAQ as HDP. Almost $100 million was raised.

In August, 2015, Hortonworks announced it would acquire Onyara, Inc., the creator of Apache NiFi, a top-level open source project. Apache NiFi was made available through the NSA technology transfer program in 2014. Over eight years, Onyara’s engineers were the key contributors to the U.S. government software project that evolved into Apache NiFi.

When a secondary share offering was announced in January 2016, the share price dropped to about half of what it was at the IPO. After operating losses deepened through 2015 and 2016, Herb Cunitz (who had been president since 2012) left the company in August 2016. In 2016, the company was ranked #42 on the Deloitte Fast 500 North America list. After a round of layoffs, Raj Verma was the president and chief operating officer from January 2017 to July 2017. Scott Davidson was named the new chief operating officer from July 2017.

Hortonworks hosts the Hadoop Summit community trade show, along with Yahoo!. Hortonworks is a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.

Hortonworks partners with software-related companies, including BMC Software for business service management and automation, Attunity and Cleo for data integration, and SAP and VMware for cloud, database and other virtualization infrastructure, and with Stratoscale. In 2015 Hortonworks started partnering with ManTech Commercial Services and B23 to develop OpenSOC.