Thursday, January 25, 2018

Snowflake raises $263 million for data warehousing

Snowflake Computing, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, announced $263 million in new venture funding to support its data warehouse business built for the cloud.

The company said it is seeing a global surge in demand for Snowflake’s data-warehouse-as-a-service, which is now available across four AWS deployment zones. A big focus is on data analytics. The customer base grew by 300 percent in 2017. Notable accounts include Capital One, Lionsgate, Nielsen and Overstock.com.

“Data is the currency of today’s economy and the data warehouse is the engine of that economy,” Snowflake CEO, Bob Muglia said. “But legacy technologies still hinder organizations from becoming modern, data-driven enterprises. Snowflake’s vision, which began with the data warehouse built for the cloud, has gained significant traction with enterprises across dozens of industries. Today’s announcement further validates Snowflake’s continued mission to enable a true data economy by removing the barriers that prevent enterprises from easily acquiring insight from all their data no matter where that data resides.”

The new funding was led by ICONIQ Capital, Altimeter Capital and newcomer Sequoia Capital. Snowflake’s existing funding partners also invested in the round: Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. With this round of funding, Snowflake’s pre-money valuation is $1.5 billion. Since its founding in 2012, Snowflake has raised a total of $473 million.


Snowflake is headed by Bob Muglia, who previously was president of Microsoft’s $16 billion Server and Tools Business, responsible for products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and Windows Azure.