Snowflake Closes $100 Million in Series D Funding with New and Existing Venture Partners

Additional financing enables the #1 ranked cloud data warehouse to continue its exponential growth and rapid enterprise market adoption.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Apr. 5, 2017 Snowflake Computing, the only data warehouse built for the cloud, today announced it has closed $100 million in growth funding led by ICONIQ Capital and accompanied by Madrona Venture Group. Snowflake’s Series D round also includes all of Snowflake’s existing funding partners: Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Since its founding in 2012, Snowflake has raised a total of $205 million in funding.

Today’s round of funding will help Snowflake execute new and existing strategies, including:

  • Expanding current operations across the US and UK, and establishing Snowflake operations across other EU nations and Asia Pacific to address the global surge in demand for Snowflake’s data-warehouse-as-a-service.
  • Growing Snowflake’s world-class engineering team, with a special focus on Snowflake’s newest engineering office in Bellevue, Washington, to continue to deliver industry-first architecture and technology enhancements to the #1 ranked cloud data warehouse.
  • Continuing to deliver new innovations that further expand Snowflake’s lead over legacy cloud and on-premises solutions, while transforming what a data warehouse can achieve in order to expand the global market for data warehousing.
Bob Muglia, CEO, Snowflake

“We received an enormous amount of interest from the venture capital community for our Series D round, and we’re ecstatic to have ICONIQ and Madrona help advance Snowflake’s continued success,” Snowflake CEO, Bob Muglia said. “The additional funding will help us serve organizations of all sizes and across all industries, with the best platform to enable the data requirements for modern business. We’ll continue to advance our industry-leading technology to serve our current and future customers.”

The numbers already show that enterprises are moving away from on-premises and cloud legacy systems that inhibit the data-driven enterprise:

  • IDC predicts that through to 2018, spending on cloud-based, big data and business analytics technology will grow 5x faster than spending for on-premises.1
  • 99 percent of data professionals say the data warehouse is very important or important to their business operations.2
  • But 75 percent of data executives say they can’t deliver useful data analytics due to inflexible solutions.3
  • Yet, the promising news is that 32 percent already use a cloud data warehouse and 93 percent see the benefits of a data warehouse built for the cloud.2

Matt Jacobson, General Partner at ICONIQ Capital, recognized Snowflake’s product innovation and its ability to execute as key factors. “Everything that makes a company great now centers on data: the speed to assemble and organize data, and the ability to extract value and insight from that data,” Matt said. “Snowflake has perfectly positioned itself at the core of the data revolution.”

Madrona managing director S. Somasegar had a successful 27-year career at Microsoft, culminating in his last role as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division.

“Cloud-native solutions, those built from the ground up for cloud, are what modern enterprises need to move quickly and efficiently in the cloud environment that is coming to dominate IT infrastructure. Snowflake is doing just that, and in the process, is upending an industry that began 30 years ago. We are excited to work with them as they reimagine what enterprise computing means in a cloud-based world.”

Snowflake’s latest round of venture funding comes just two months after the company’s year-end financial close on January 31. Highlights from the previous financial year include:

  • Nearly doubling its customer base and increasing total customer data storage by over 300 percent. Snowflake also lowered its storage pricing by 80 percent, making its storage pricing the lowest among data warehouse vendors.
  • Ranking as the #1 cloud data warehouse, beating competitors such as Google BigQuery, Teradata, IBM dashDB, HPE Vertica, Microsoft Azure SQL, SAP HANA and Oracle Exadata in Gigaom Research’s report “Sector Roadmap: Cloud Analytic Databases 2017”.
  • Delivering a comprehensive set of features to eliminate the manual and administrative overhead and complexity associated with managing a data warehouse.
  • Launching Snowflake On Demand – a fast and simple sign-up process to give data users of any type access to the most affordable and effective data warehouse.

Other recent milestones include Snowflake’s new cloud deployment in the EU (Frankfurt) region to address growing customer demand; enterprise-grade security features including support for HIPAA compliance and federated authentication; and expanding the Snowflake ecosystem by adding a number of new partnerships with technology vendors such as Tableau, Looker, MicroStrategy, Informatica and Talend. In addition, and in response to increased interest from integration partners, Snowflake recently launched the Snowflake Solution Partner Program. The program supports and empowers qualified Snowflake integration partners such as Slalom and UserReady that demonstrate the skills and experience to implement solutions that leverage Snowflake.

For more information about what Snowflake’s funding announcement means to its customers, and the industry, view Bob Muglia’s blog.

  1. “IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Analytics, Cognitive/AI, and Big Data 2017 Predictions,” Doc #US41866016, Nov. 2016
  2. “The State of the Data Warehouse, A survey of data professionals” Survey. March 2015
  3. “Data Analytics: Beyond the Hype, A survey of data professionals and executives” Survey. September 2016

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About Snowflake Computing

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 location. 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. Snowflake: Your data, no limits. Find out more at snowflake.net.

Media Contact

Eszter Szikora

Snowflake Computing

(408) 666-5694

[email protected]

About ICONIQ Capital

ICONIQ Capital is a global, multi-family office and merchant bank for a group of influential families.

About Madrona Venture Group

Madrona (www.madrona.com) has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region’s most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominantly in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum, including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages approximately $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Apptio, Rover.com, and Redfin.