Data warehousing company Snowflake garners $450M in funding

Snowflake Computing says it has closed $450 million in additional growth funding led by Sequoia Capital. The remainder of Snowflake’s existing investors also participated: Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. New investor Meritech Capital also joined this round, which raises Snowflake’s pre-money valuation to $3.5 billion. This is the company’s second financing announcement in 2018, bringing Snowflake’s total amount raised to $923 million.

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.

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.”

The funding will help Snowflake execute new and existing strategies, such as:

• Continuing to expand its multi-cloud strategy. With Snowflake now available on Microsoft Azure and AWS, customers can choose Snowflake and the cloud infrastructure platforms that best fit their needs.
   
• Growing Snowflake’s sales teams across the US and around the world to meet the increasing demand for the only cloud-built data warehouse.
   
• Investing further in Snowflake’s data warehouse-as-a-service by growing the company’s world-class engineering team, located at its San Mateo, California headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, at Snowflake’s engineering office in Bellevue, Washington, and at the company’s newest engineering location planned for Berlin, Germany.
   
• Continuing to solve customers’ biggest data challenges by delivering features like the Snowflake Data Sharing.

“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.”