Inside Snowflake: From 2012 to Now Into a $1.4 billion business
Founders: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, Marcin Żukowski
Founded Year: 2012
Investors: Sutter Hill Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Sequoia Capital
Funding Raised: $1.4 billion
What Is the business model of Snowflake?
Cloud-based data warehousing company that provides a fully-managed relational data warehouse as a service, charging customers based on usage of storage and compute separately
How Snowflake got started?
Founded by database experts in 2012, they built Snowflake from scratch to run in the cloud to separate storage and compute, launching the product in 2014 and disrupting traditional data warehouses
what growth strategy has Snowflake followed?
Differentiated with a performance-scalable, easy-to-use solution and partnered with all major cloud providers, used a sales-driven growth strategy targeting large enterprises’ big data needs, culminating in one of the largest software IPOs
what are the top products/features of Snowflake
Snowflake Data Cloud, Snowflake Data Marketplace, Snowpark developer platform
what was the biggest challenge faced by Snowflake?
Faced skepticism from incumbent database vendors and had to convince enterprises to move sensitive data to a new cloud-only platform, as well as intense competition from offerings by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud