Jump to content

Snowflake Inc.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 2001:1715:9d99:d430:154a:7cb7:7452:6334 (talk) at 07:07, 8 May 2020 (→‎Funding). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Snowflake Inc.
Company typePrivate
IndustryData warehousing
Founded2012; 12 years ago (2012)
FounderBenoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski
HeadquartersSan Mateo, California
Key people
Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO; Benoit Dageville, President, Product; Thierry Cruanes, CTO; Marcin Zukowski, Co-Founder
ProductsCloud-based data warehousing
Number of employees
1400 (2019)
Websitewww.snowflake.com

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. [1] It was publicly launched by Bob Muglia in 2014 after two years in stealth mode.[2][3]

Snowflake offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data warehouse-as-a-service".[4][5] It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. Snowflake runs on Amazon S3 since 2014,[2] and on Microsoft Azure since 2018[6] It is being rolled out on Google Cloud Platform in 2019.[7][8] Its Snowflake Data Exchange allows customers to discover, exchange and securely share data.[9]

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.[10] The company's name was chosen as a tribute to the founders' love of snow sports. [11]

Snowflake came out of stealth mode in October 2014[12] shortly after appointing former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO that June. The cloud data warehouse became generally available in June 2015[13][14] 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 [15] in 2019, and was ranked No. 1 on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups.[16] As of Feb 9th, 2020, Snowflake has 3,400 active customers[17], including Capital One, Rent the Runway and Adobe.

In May 2019, Frank Slootman joined Snowflake as its new CEO.[7] 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. [18]

In September 2019, Snowflake was ranked #2 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of 2019, a list that recognizes the best private cloud companies in the world.[19]

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.[20][21] A further $100 million was raised in April 2017.[22][23] In January 2018, Snowflake announced a $263 million investment round putting the company at a $1.5 billion unicorn valuation. [24] In October 2018, Snowflake raised another $450 million, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion.[4] It was announced on Feb 7th, 2020 that the company had raised another $479M USD, increasing their valuation to $12.4B USD.[25]

References

  1. ^ "With huge new $450M funding round, Snowflake Computing has now raised almost $1 billion". www.geekwire.com. 2018-10-11.
  2. ^ a b Handy, Alex (October 23, 2014). "Snowflake offers cloud data warehouse as a service, cheaply". SD Times. Retrieved November 20, 2014.
  3. ^ Wingfield, Nick (October 21, 2014). "Longtime Microsoft Executive Opens Cloud Database Start-Up". The New York Times. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  4. ^ a b Dignan, Larry (11 October 2018). "Snowflake raises $450 million in another VC round, valued at $3.5 billion". ZDNet. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  5. ^ Bass, Dina (October 21, 2014). "Snowflake Takes Aim at Amazon, Hadoop With New Data Service". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  6. ^ Brust, Andrew (July 12, 2018). "Snowflake's cloud data warehouse comes to Microsoft Azure". ZDNet. Retrieved July 24, 2019.
  7. ^ a b Taulli, Tom (June 5, 2019). "Snowflake: The AI Force Multiplier". Forbes. Retrieved July 24, 2019.
  8. ^ Ichhpurani, Kevin (June 4, 2019). "Announcing Snowflake on Google Cloud Platform". Google Cloud Blog. Retrieved July 24, 2019.
  9. ^ "Snowflake Announces Data Exchange to Break Down Data Barriers" (Press release). PR Newswire. June 4, 2019. Retrieved July 24, 2019.
  10. ^ Anders, George (September 4, 2019). "You're never too old to excel: How Snowflake thrives with 'dinosaur' cofounders and a 60-year-old CEO". Linkedin. Retrieved October 13, 2019.
  11. ^ https://fortune.com/2014/10/21/oracle-microsoft-reinvent-data-warehouse/
  12. ^ Hesseldahl, Arik (June 23, 2015). "Big Data Startup Snowflake Raises $45 Million, Launches First Product". Re/code. Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  13. ^ Brust, Andrew (June 26, 2015). "Cloud data warehouse race heats up". ZDNet. Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  14. ^ Darfler, Benjamin (July 28, 2015). "Snowflake Announces General Availability of their Cloud Data Warehouse Offering". InfoQ. Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  15. ^ https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/#1c423a165f94
  16. ^ Hempel, Jessi (September 4, 2019). "LinkedIn Top Startups 2019: The 50 hottest U.S. companies to work for now". LinkedIn./
  17. ^ https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/09/after-479m-round-on-12-4b-valuation-snowflake-ceo-says-ipo-is-next-step/
  18. ^ Carey, Scott (October 3, 2019). "Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman talks vision, AWS tension and IPO plans". Computerworld. Retrieved October 13, 2019.
  19. ^ "The Cloud 100 2019". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-03-12.
  20. ^ Vanian, Jonathan (June 23, 2015). "This big data startup is as unique as a snowflake". Fortune Magazine. Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  21. ^ Vanian, Jonathan (October 21, 2014). "With $26M, Snowflake Computing is hoping its take on data warehousing will hit the mainstream". Gigaom. Retrieved November 10, 2015.
  22. ^ Dignan, Larry (April 5, 2017). "Snowflake Computing raises $100 million to expand cloud data warehouse footprint". ZDNet. Retrieved July 31, 2017.
  23. ^ "Cloud data warehouse startup Snowflake raises $100 million led by Iconiq". VentureBeat. April 5, 2017. Retrieved July 31, 2017.
  24. ^ Miller, Ron. "Snowflake lands massive $263 million investment on unicorn valuation". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-02-08.
  25. ^ https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/09/after-479m-round-on-12-4b-valuation-snowflake-ceo-says-ipo-is-next-step/

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Snowflake_Inc.&oldid=955514364"