Short answers, pulled from the story.
Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California, by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes had previously worked as data architects at Oracle, and Żukowski had co-founded Vectorwise.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, a cofounder of Neeva, has been Snowflake's chief executive since he succeeded Frank Slootman on the 28th of February 2024. Slootman had joined as CEO in May 2019 after leading ServiceNow.
Snowflake Inc. offers the Data Cloud, a platform that unifies data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, and data sharing. It also provides Snowpark, Unistore, the Native App Framework, Snowpipe, the Snowflake Marketplace, and the Cortex suite of generative AI services.
In 2024, hundreds of Snowflake customers were targeted in a mass data theft and extortion campaign by the ShinyHunters hacking group, affecting companies including Ticketmaster, AT&T, and Neiman Marcus. Mandiant's investigation found no breach of Snowflake's own environment, tracing the attacks to compromised customer credentials, and Connor Riley Moucka was arrested on the 30th of October 2024.
Snowflake raised funding in stages, from a $5 million Series A in 2012 to a $479 million round on the 7th of February 2020. It reached unicorn status in January 2018 with a $263 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Snowflake raised $3.4 billion when it went public in September 2020, making it one of the largest software IPOs and the largest to double in value on its first trading day.