Decacorn Snowflake Ready for IPO

According to a Allied Market Research report, the global data warehousing market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 8.2% from $18.61 billion in 2017 to reach $34.69 billion by 2025. Last month, cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake raised $479 million at a valuation of $12.4 billion from investors including Salesforce Ventures.

Snowflake’s Offerings

San Mateo, California-based Snowflake was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski. Snowflake is a data warehouse built on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and is a true SaaS offering. It provides “data warehouse-as-a-services” to enable enterprise users to store and analyze data. It’s designed with a patented new architecture to be the centerpiece for data pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes, data application development, and for building data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data. Snowflake is also a powerful query processing back-end platform for developers creating modern data-driven applications.

Snowflake’s cloud data platform and data warehouse provide robust features and out-of-the-box functionality. The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform provides a SaaS-delivered DWaaS (Data Warehouse as a Service) built for the cloud. The solution also includes data sharing, data lake, data replication, and custom development capabilities, in effect also serving as a data PaaS. It delivers PaaS-like functionality and the built-in data warehouse design flexibility developers need to power applications for BI, AI, machine learning, IoT, and more.

Its competitors include Vantage, SAP, Yellowbrick Data, Microsoft Azure, and AWS. However, it also works with leading data management, data integration, and BI partners to enable users to perform interactive analytics. Its partner ecosystem includes AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Tableau, Looker, Informatica, Talend, Fivetran, Matillion, and ThoughtSpot.

Snowflake’s Financials

Snowflake is estimated to have generated revenue of over $100 million in 2019 at a growth rate of 174%. The company added 500 new customers in the last quarter to take the total active customers to 3,400 active customers. It is also reported to about 2,500 customers have shifted away from Amazon Web Services’ Redshift data warehousing service to Snowflake. These customers include Adobe, Instacart, Deliveroo, and Strava. The company isn’t profitable yet.

Snowflake has raised over $1.4 billion from investors including Dragoneer Investment Group, Salesforce Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Wing Venture Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, and Meritech Capital Partners. In its latest round of funding, Snowflake raised $479 million in a round led by Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from Salesforce Ventures at a valuation of $12.4 billion. This is three times its valuation in October 2018 when it had raised $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of $3.9 billion.

In May 2019, Frank Slootman replaced former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO. Frank was CEO at Data Domain from June 2003 till its $2.4 billion acquisition by EMC in 2009. From 2011 to 2017, he Chairman and CEO of ServiceNow, taking it from under $100 million in revenue, through a successful IPO in 2012, to $1.4 billion in revenue.

Frank says Snowflake has the scale and the velocity to go public, but they are waiting for the right time.