Snowflake Raises $26M in Funding to Reinvent the Data Warehouse

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Oct. 21, 2014
Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, announced that it has raised a total of $26 million in funding from prominent venture capital firms Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. The funding will be used to expand its team to accelerate product development, build out customer and partner ecosystems, and deliver on the vision to reinvent the data warehouse for the cloud.

“There has been shockingly little innovation in data warehousing in a decade. That creates a huge and largely unaddressed market opportunity—to create a data warehouse designed for the data, analytics, and technology innovations of today and tomorrow,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake. “The venture capital we’ve attracted underscores that investors see the same opportunity, and demonstrates their confidence in the work done over the last two years by Snowflake’s world-class team. This funding will further accelerate our product innovation and support our go-to-market strategy and investments.”

Snowflake’s most recent Series B round of financing was led by Redpoint Ventures and joined by Sutter Hill Ventures, who provided seed funding and led the Series A round of financing, and Wing Ventures. John Walecka, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures whose past investments include data innovators such as Sybase, Documentum and Datameer, has joined the Snowflake board of directors. Snowflake’s board also includes Mike Speiser, managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures, whose investments include Pure Storage, Platfora and Sumo Logic; and John McMahon, whose career in enterprise software has focused on building and running world-class sales, marketing, and professional services organizations at leading software companies including BMC Software, BladeLogic, and Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC).

Snowflake was founded by a team of data experts who set out to reinvent the data warehouse. Today Snowflake emerged from stealth to announce the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™, a completely new data warehouse built from the ground up as a cloud service. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse introduces an innovative architecture uniquely able to bring together all users, all data and all workloads in a single SQL data warehouse. Snowflake’s patent-pending new architecture delivers the power of SQL data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud—at a 90 percent lower cost than on-premises data warehouses. The Snowflake team includes data experts from companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata, and holds over 120 patents in databases and data processing.

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“Snowflake is a company with the potential to disrupt a huge market. They have quietly assembled a world-class team of top database talent and put that brain trust to work building a transformational data warehouse product,” said Mike Speiser, managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures. “They have taken on one of the most complex areas of software and rapidly built a completely new product that is a huge innovation over current technology. It’s a winning offering for customers and investors, and definitely a company to watch.”

“The market opportunity for Snowflake to reinvent the SQL data warehouse for the cloud is enormous and transformative,” said John Walecka, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures. “All of the investment into business intelligence tools for unstructured data may have overshadowed what may be the biggest untapped void in data analytics. Snowflake is changing the game by making data warehousing accessible to everyone by designing a new data warehouse from scratch.”

About Snowflake
Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, was founded in 2012 by a team of experts who hold over 120 patents in the fields of database architecture, data warehouses, query optimization and parallelization. Snowflake was created with the vision to reinvent the data warehouse, bringing together all data, all users and all workloads in a single service. The company is backed by leading venture capital investors including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at www.snowflake.com.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287
[email protected]