Snowflake Inc.

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Snowflake Inc. spent more than two years hiding what it was building. When the company came out of stealth mode in October 2014, it revealed that 80 organizations were already using it. Today, Snowflake describes itself as an American cloud-based data platform company. It supports data analysis and lets multiple users reach the same data sets with almost no delay. The platform runs across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. How did a company that concealed its existence for two years become one that other companies now trust with some of their most sensitive records? And what happened when criminals later tried to break into the very data it was built to protect?

• 2. Three Founders And A Backer

  ›

  Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes spent years as data architects at Oracle Corporation before deciding to build something of their own. In July 2012, they founded Snowflake Inc. in San Mateo, California, together with Marcin Żukowski, who had earlier co-founded Vectorwise.

  The company's first chief executive was not one of its three founders. Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures, provided Snowflake's early funding and served as its first CEO. Sutter Hill's money got the company started, but its leadership would soon change hands.

• 3. A Revolving Door Of CEOs

  ›

  In June 2014, Bob Muglia, who had previously worked at Microsoft, was named Snowflake's chief executive. In May 2019, Frank Slootman, formerly the CEO of ServiceNow, joined the company as its new chief executive.

  Slootman remained CEO until the 28th of February 2024, when he retired. Sridhar Ramaswamy, a cofounder of Neeva, succeeded him in the role. During Slootman's years running the company, in May 2021, Snowflake became a distributed company, moving its principal executive office to Bozeman, Montana. That distributed structure meant the company no longer had one fixed home base, years before its headquarters would move again.

• 4. One Platform Many Workloads

  ›

  Snowflake markets its core offering as the Data Cloud, a single platform meant to bring together data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, and data sharing. Its architecture separates compute from storage, letting customers scale analytics up or down as needed.

  In 2020, the company introduced Snowpark, a framework that lets developers write data pipelines and business logic in Java, Scala, and Python from inside Snowflake.

  A year later, in 2021, Snowflake launched Unistore. This hybrid workload combines transactional and analytical processing on a single platform, enabling real-time applications built directly on Snowflake.

  Two years after that, in 2023, the company introduced its Native App Framework. It gives developers a way to build, distribute, and monetize applications that run securely inside a customer's own Snowflake account.

  Snowpipe, one of the platform's other services, handles continuous data ingestion, while the Snowflake Marketplace lets organizations find and share live, query-ready datasets.

  In 2024, Snowflake launched Cortex, a set of generative AI services built into the platform. Cortex gives users access to large language models, vector search, and model deployment tools. Developers can call these tools through SQL or Python. More recently, the company has added Snowflake Intelligence to this lineup.

  Tableau, Power BI, and Sigma Computing are among the outside tools Snowflake connects to for machine learning, streaming analytics, business intelligence, and unstructured data workloads. That widening set of integrations was only part of how Snowflake grew. It also expanded by buying other companies outright.

• 5. Buying Its Way Forward

  ›

  In October 2022, Snowflake bought a 5% stake in OpenAP, a company working in advanced television advertising.

  Neeva, a search startup built around privacy, was Snowflake's next purchase; in May 2023 the company agreed to acquire it for $185 million.

  In June 2025, Snowflake announced it would acquire Crunchy Data for approximately $250 million. Crunchy Data provides cloud-based PostgreSQL services and distributes certified Postgres. Later that year, Snowflake moved its headquarters back to California, settling in Menlo Park.

  In January 2026, Snowflake announced an agreement to acquire Observe, an observability company built around artificial intelligence tools. Not every headline about Snowflake's growth came from something it chose to buy.

• 6. The ShinyHunters Breach

  ›

  Hundreds of Snowflake customers were targeted in 2024 as part of a mass data theft and extortion campaign run by a hacking group called ShinyHunters. Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, Santander Bank, Neiman Marcus, LendingTree, AT&T, Pure Storage, and Bausch Health all confirmed breaches tied to the campaign.

  In May 2024, Snowflake worked with Mandiant on an investigation. Mandiant found no evidence that Snowflake's own environment had been breached; instead, attackers had used compromised customer credentials to get in.

  Two men drove the hacking conspiracy: Connor Riley Moucka, who also went by Waifu or Catist, and John Erin Binns, known as IRDev. Moucka, 25 years old and living in Kitchener, Ontario, was arrested on the 30th of October 2024. A Washington state court indicted him on charges of conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, extortion, and aggravated identity theft.

  The breach became one more chapter in a company whose growth was already measured in hundreds of millions, then billions, of dollars.

• 7. Raising Money And Going Public

  ›

  Snowflake raised its first outside money in 2012, a $5 million Series A round. It raised $26 million in October 2014.

  In June 2015, the company raised $45 million and launched its first product, the cloud data warehouse. It raised $100 million in April 2017.

  In January 2018, Snowflake raised $263 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a unicorn. Later that same year, in October 2018, it raised $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $3.5 billion.

  On the 7th of February 2020, Snowflake raised $479 million. The company went public that September, raising $3.4 billion in one of the largest software IPOs on record. It was also the largest software IPO to double in value on its first day of trading.

  Going public in 2020 was not the end of Snowflake's growth story.

• 8. By The Numbers

  ›

  In February 2026, Snowflake reported fourth-quarter product revenue of $1.23 billion for its 2026 fiscal year, up 30% from the year before. Full-year product revenue for that fiscal year reached $4.72 billion.

  Remaining performance obligations, the value of contracts not yet recognized as revenue, totaled $9.77 billion, a 42% increase reflecting strong demand for AI infrastructure. More than 9,100 accounts were using Snowflake's AI features by that point.

  With those contracted commitments still climbing, Snowflake's next quarterly reports will have even larger numbers to explain.