Snowflake Computing, a startup that's built on Amazon's cloud but competes with the tech giant's data warehousing service, has raised $100 million in new funding.
But CEO Bob Muglia, a former top executive at Microsoft and Juniper Networks, says his San Mateo company is more of a partner with Amazon than a competitor.
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"We are designed to take advantage of the cloud service that Amazon Web Services provides and they are a great partner of ours," he said in an interview. "We work very closely with them even though we compete with their Redshift service. But Amazon has 80-some odd services and we compete with one of them. We work together pretty well."
Snowflake said it raised the new funding to take advantage of the trends that helped it nearly double its customer base to 470. Muglia said revenue more than tripled in the past year and is on pace to repeat that this year.
"There is a stampede of customers moving to the public cloud and people care a lot today about analyzing data," Muglia said. "Those trends bode well for Snowflake because we built a product that very uniquely allows companies to work with massive amounts of data with hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously and answer any question you could possibly ask."
No other data warehousing product, including Amazon's Redshift, can scale as easily as Snowflake, Muglia argues.
"If you have a large on-premises data warehouse from Oracle or others that you want to move to the cloud, there is nobody you want to go to over us," he said.
The company grew its workforce to about 175 now from about 100 a year ago. Muglia said he expects that number to be between 250 and 300 a year from now as he beefs up Snowflake's sales and marketing push.
The company recently leased more space across from its South Ellsworth Avenue headquarters and established an R&D outpost near Seattle in Bellevue, Washington, to accommodate that growth.