Snowflake Inc. was founded by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski in July 2012. These three former Oracle engineers launched the company in San Mateo, California, with a vision to separate storage from compute in data warehousing.
Snowflake went public on the 16th of September 2020 through an initial public offering that raised $3.4 billion. This event marked one of the largest software IPOs in history and transformed the company from a venture-backed startup into a publicly traded entity.
In May 2024, Snowflake customers were targeted in a mass data theft and extortion campaign involving major organizations like Ticketmaster and AT&T. An investigation by Snowflake and Mandiant found no evidence of a breach to Snowflake's environment, but rather that customer credentials had been compromised by external actors.
Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as CEO of Snowflake Inc. on the 28th of February 2024 after Frank Slootman retired. Ramaswamy is the co-founder of the privacy-focused search startup Neeva, which Snowflake acquired in May 2023.
Snowflake launched its first product, the cloud data warehouse, in June 2015. This launch marked the beginning of a new era where data could be accessed simultaneously by multiple users with minimal latency on the public cloud.