Cloud data warehouse startup Snowflake Computing raises $450 million to accelerate U.S. and global expansion, now valued at $3.5 billion

Snowflake Computing, a startup that provides data warehouse as a service designed for the cloud, has raised a whopping $450 million to accelerate U.S. and global expansion, valuing the company at $3.5 billion. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Wing Ventures, and Meritech Capital. This is the company’s second financing announcement in 2018, bringing Snowflake’s total amount raised to $923 million.

Founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Marcin Zukowski, and Thierry Cruanes, Snowflake Computing is the only data warehouse built for the cloud. Snowflake delivers the performance, concurrency, and simplicity needed to store and analyze all of an organization’s data in one solution. Snowflake’s technology combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

The data warehouse market is expected to grow by more than 40 percent, from $14 billion in 2017 to $20 billion in 2020, according to global market intelligence firm IDC*. In addition, multiple global research and market intelligence firms have revealed that only a small fraction of big data initiatives are successfully deployed to production. These figures reveal the increasing demand for a modern data warehouse as legacy cloud and on-premise solutions continue to provide limited insight from limited data to a limited number of users in the enterprise. Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse removes those barriers, so all business users gain limitless insight from all their data, quickly, and at a fraction of the cost of legacy solutions.

Snowflake is a values-based company, and its first value is to always put the customer first. Since the general availability of its offering in mid-2015, Snowflake has earned the trust of more than 1,000 active customers and continues to grow rapidly. New customers in 2018 include leading brands such as Netflix, Office Depot, DoorDash, Netgear, Ebates and Yamaha. The power, performance, flexibility and infinite elasticity enabled by Snowflake’s cloud-built architecture will continue to drive the company’s growth and equip Snowflake to meet the many use cases that a cloud-built data warehouse offers.

In addition, Snowflake recently announced its availability on Microsoft Azure and its continued support for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Providing multiple options for customers continues to increase Snowflake’s market opportunity for organizations that prefer a specific cloud provider, or require a cloud-built data warehouse for a multi-cloud strategy.

“Learning to be data-driven is an imperative for every organization today, and a data-driven organization must be in control of its data,” Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia said. “Snowflake is the most powerful data warehouse in the world for analytics solutions. That power delivers the security, control and business answers needed to enable data-driven organizations. This is driving spectacular growth for our company, and this latest funding round will provide Snowflake with the resources we need to serve our rapidly growing set of new and existing customers around the world.”

“Snowflake is a key enterprise solution for the public cloud. The company’s flexible, cloud-built data warehouse enables customers to quickly derive deep insights from their data without the hassle and costs of other, legacy solutions,” Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach said. “Snowflake has truly disrupted the data warehouse market but the best is yet to come. We are confident Snowflake’s customer-first approach and focus on innovation will continue to drive the company’s growth.”