Who founded Snowflake Inc. and when did they start the company?

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.

When did Snowflake go public and how much money did it raise?

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.

What happened to Snowflake customers in May 2024?

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.

Who is the current CEO of Snowflake Inc. and when did he take the role?

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.

When did Snowflake launch its cloud data warehouse product?

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.

Snowflake Inc.: the story on HearLore

Three former Oracle engineers walked into a coffee shop in San Mateo, California, in July 2012 with a radical idea that would eventually upend the multi-billion dollar database industry. Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski had spent years building data architectures for Oracle Corporation, but they grew frustrated with the limitations of traditional on-premise hardware. They believed that the future of data warehousing did not lie in expensive, monolithic servers that required years of installation and tuning, but in a system that could scale elastically on the public cloud. Their vision was to separate storage from compute, allowing customers to pay only for the processing power they used at any given moment. This architectural shift was so counterintuitive to the industry norms of the time that it took years to convince investors that a database could truly live entirely on Amazon Web Services without sacrificing performance. Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures, saw the potential in their whiteboard sketches and provided the initial funding that allowed the trio to turn their concept into a reality. The company operated in stealth mode for nearly two years, refining a platform that promised to make data analysis as simple as turning on a light switch.

By June 2014, Snowflake emerged from stealth mode with a product that was already being used by 80 organizations, yet the company remained a ghost in the machine of the tech world. Bob Muglia, a former executive from Microsoft, took the helm as CEO in June 2014, bringing a disciplined operational mindset to the engineering-heavy startup. The company had to prove that its cloud-native architecture could handle the massive scale required by enterprise clients, a task that traditional databases struggled to perform without significant downtime. Snowflake launched its first product, the cloud data warehouse, in June 2015, marking the beginning of a new era where data could be accessed simultaneously by multiple users with minimal latency. The platform did not force customers to choose between speed and scale, a trade-off that had defined the industry for decades. Instead, it allowed organizations to run complex queries on petabytes of data without the need for manual database administration. The company expanded its infrastructure footprint over the following years, running on Amazon Web Services since 2014, adding support for Microsoft Azure in 2018, and joining the Google Cloud Platform in 2019. This multi-cloud strategy ensured that Snowflake remained agnostic to the underlying infrastructure, giving customers the freedom to move their data without being locked into a single cloud provider.

In June 2019, Frank Slootman, the former CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO, bringing a reputation for aggressive growth and operational efficiency that transformed the company from a promising startup into a market leader. Under his leadership, Snowflake launched the Snowflake Data Exchange in June 2019, a feature that allowed organizations to share live, query-ready datasets with one another without moving the data. This innovation turned the platform into a marketplace where data providers could monetize their information directly, creating a network effect that accelerated adoption. The company added Knoema as a data provider in December 2020, expanding the variety of datasets available to its users. By May 2021, Snowflake had become a distributed company, establishing its principal executive office in Bozeman, Montana, a move that reflected its commitment to a remote-first culture even before the pandemic made it a global necessity. The company continued to innovate, launching Snowpark in 2020, a developer framework that enabled engineers to write data pipelines and business logic using Java, Scala, and Python directly within the platform. This move blurred the lines between data engineering and application development, allowing teams to build complex workflows without leaving the Snowflake environment. The introduction of Unistore in 2021 further expanded the platform's capabilities, combining transactional and analytical operations to support real-time applications.

The year 2023 marked a significant pivot for Snowflake as it introduced the Native App Framework, allowing developers to build, distribute, and monetize applications that run securely within a customer's Snowflake account. This framework empowered the ecosystem to grow organically, with third-party developers creating tools that integrated seamlessly with the core platform. By 2024, Snowflake launched Cortex, a set of generative AI services embedded directly into the platform, including access to large language models, vector search, and model deployment capabilities. This integration allowed users to build AI-powered applications using SQL or Python, democratizing access to advanced machine learning tools for organizations that lacked specialized AI teams. The company also introduced Snowflake Intelligence, further embedding artificial intelligence into the fabric of data management. These developments positioned Snowflake not just as a storage solution, but as a comprehensive data cloud that could handle everything from machine learning to streaming analytics. The platform supported integrations with popular business intelligence tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Sigma Computing, ensuring that Snowflake remained the central hub for data-driven decision-making across industries.

In 2024, the cloud data platform faced its most significant crisis when customers of Snowflake were targeted as part of a mass customer data theft and extortion campaign. The breach affected major organizations including Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, Santander Bank, Neiman Marcus, LendingTree, AT&T, Pure Storage, and Bausch Health, sending shockwaves through the cybersecurity community. An investigation conducted by Snowflake in collaboration with Mandiant in May 2024 found no evidence of Snowflake's environment being breached, but rather that customer credentials had been compromised by external actors. Two men were identified as the masterminds behind the hacking conspiracy: Connor Riley Moucka, also known as Waifu, and John Erin Binns, known as IRDev. Moucka, a 25-year-old from Kitchener, Ontario, was arrested on the 30th of October 2024, and a Washington state court issued an indictment on charges of conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, extortion, and aggravated identity theft. The incident highlighted the vulnerabilities inherent in shared infrastructure and the importance of securing customer credentials, even when the platform itself remained intact. Snowflake responded by enhancing its security protocols and working closely with affected customers to mitigate the damage, reinforcing its commitment to protecting the data entrusted to its platform.

The financial trajectory of Snowflake from its inception to its public listing was nothing short of meteoric, with the company raising capital in rounds that grew exponentially in size and valuation. In 2012, Snowflake raised $5 million in a Series A round, followed by $26 million in October 2014 and $45 million in June 2015. By April 2017, the company had raised $100 million, and in January 2018, it secured $263 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, officially becoming a unicorn. The momentum continued with a $450 million round led by Sequoia Capital in October 2018, which valued the company at $3.5 billion. On the 7th of February 2020, Snowflake raised $479 million, at which point it had 3,400 active customers. The company went public on the 16th of September 2020, via an initial public offering that raised $3.4 billion, one of the largest software IPOs in history. The stock doubled on its first day of trading, signaling strong investor confidence in the company's growth prospects. This financial success was driven by the company's ability to scale rapidly and its adoption by enterprise clients who were eager to modernize their data infrastructure. The IPO marked a turning point, transforming Snowflake from a venture-backed startup into a publicly traded company with the resources to continue its aggressive expansion and innovation.

Snowflake's growth strategy included a series of strategic acquisitions designed to expand its capabilities and enter new markets. In October 2022, the company acquired a 5% stake in advanced TV advertising firm OpenAP, signaling its interest in expanding beyond traditional data warehousing into advertising technology. In May 2023, Snowflake agreed to acquire privacy-focused search startup Neeva for $185 million, bringing advanced search capabilities and privacy features to its platform. The acquisition of Neeva's cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy led to a leadership transition, with Frank Slootman retiring as CEO on the 28th of February 2024, and Ramaswamy taking over the role. Looking ahead, the company announced its acquisition of Crunchy Data, a provider of cloud-based PostgreSQL services, for approximately $250 million in June 2025, and planned to acquire Observe, an AI-powered observability company, in January 2026. These moves demonstrated Snowflake's commitment to building a comprehensive data ecosystem that could handle everything from transactional workloads to advanced analytics and observability. The acquisitions were part of a broader strategy to ensure that Snowflake remained at the forefront of the data cloud revolution, providing customers with a unified platform for all their data needs.

Snowflake Inc.

The Cloud Migration

The Marketplace Revolution

Continue Browsing

Common questions

The AI Integration

The Security Breach

The Unicorn Ascent

The Strategic Acquisitions