Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based data-warehousing startup that was founded in 2012. It has raised more than $1.4 billion in venture capital, and is based in San Mateo, California. It was publicly launched by Bob Muglia in 2014 after two years in stealth mode. Snowflake offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data warehouse-as-a-service". It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. Snowflake runs on Amazon S3 since 2014, and on Microsoft Azure since 2018 It is being rolled out on Google Cloud Platform in 2019. Its Snowflake Data Exchange allows customers to discover, exchange and securely share data.
History
Snowflake Inc. was founded in 2012 in San Mateo, California by three data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Zukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise. The company's first CEO was Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures. The company's name was chosen as a tribute to the founders' love of snow sports. Snowflake came out of stealth mode in October 2014 shortly after appointing former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO that June. The clouddata warehouse became generally available in June 2015 and had 80 organizations using it at that time. Snowflake was identified as a "Cool Vendor" in Gartner's Magic Quadrant and won first place at the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World startup competition. Snowflake was listed as No. 2 on Forbes magazine's Cloud 100 list in 2019, and was ranked No. 1 on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups. As of Feb 9th, 2020, Snowflake has 3,400 active customers, including Capital One, Rent the Runway and Adobe. In May 2019, Frank Slootman joined Snowflake as its new CEO. In October 2019, Slootman said in a London press conference that Snowflake might pursue an initial public offering as early as the summer of 2020, but that many factors could change the timing. In September 2019, Snowflake was ranked #2 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of 2019, a list that recognizes the bestprivate cloud companies in the world.
Funding
Snowflake's main venture-capital backers include Sutter Hill Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Iconiq and Wing Venture Capital. The company raised $26 million before coming out of stealth and an additional $45 million was announced in June 2015. A further $100 million was raised in April 2017. In January 2018, Snowflake announced a $263 million investment round putting the company at a $1.5 billion unicorn valuation. In October 2018, Snowflake raised another $450 million, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion. It was announced on Feb 7th, 2020 that the company had raised another $479M USD, increasing their valuation to $12.4B USD.
