Snowflake

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] on Microsoft Azure since 2018[6] and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019.[7][8] Its Snowflake Data Exchange allows customers to discover, exchange and securely share data.[9] Contents 1 History 2 Funding 3 IPO 4 References 5 External links 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 February 9, 2020, Snowflake had 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 this got pushed back due to various factors. On September 16, 2020, Snowflake made an IPO at $120 a share which more than doubled in value giving it a market valuation of $70.4 billion by the end of its first day of trading, with shares closing at $253.93, selling 28 million shares and raising $3.4 billion, making it the largest software IPO and the largest IPO to double on its first day of trading to date.[18][19][20] 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.[21][22] A further $100 million was raised in April 2017.[23][24] In January 2018, Snowflake announced a $263 million investment round putting the company at a $1.5 billion unicorn valuation.[25] In October 2018, Snowflake raised another $450 million, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion.[4] It was announced on February 7, 2020 that the company had raised another $479 million, increasing its valuation to $12.4 billion.[17] IPO The company went public with its IPO listing on the NYSE on September 16, 2020. The IPO price range was between $100 to $110 a share, having increased from the initial price range of $75 to $85. Among famous pre IPO investors are Warren Buffett, who bought in his first IPO since Ford in 1956 and Sequoia Capital, among others. This brought its open price to $245.[26] On their IPO debut, the company was the highest valued software IPO ever and at the end of the day they were valued more than General Motors, Dell, and Uber.[27] References