Snowflake Computing
What they do: Provide cloud-based data warehousing services.
Problem they solve: According to a company spokesperson, “The data warehousing market has seen painfully little innovation in the last decade. It remains dominated by technology designed decades ago for a very different world.”
As more and more data migrates to the cloud, legacy data warehousing products struggle to keep up. Legacy data warehousing products were not designed for the cloud and for today’s data. In contrast to the cheap, always-on cloud, traditional data warehousing products have “been synonymous with being expensive, complex and difficult.”
At the same time, newer Big Data platforms were not designed to handle the data warehousing component and still require the specialized expertise of operations and data science experts.
How they solve it: Snowflake’s Elastic Data Warehouse is designed to take advantage of the elasticity, scalability, and flexibility of the cloud. By decoupling data storage from compute, Snowflake can independently scale storage and processing, making it possible to deliver the exact processing needed for each workload exactly when needed, while also providing low-cost storage of any volume of data.
Big50-2017 Startup @SnowflakeDB closes $100M in funding, launches data sharehouse, http://wp.me/p330ZZ-i5 #Big50 #startups Click To TweetSnowflake can handle both transactional and machine-generated data in a single system by bringing native storage of semi-structured data into a relational database that understands and fully optimizes querying of that data.
In 2017, Snowflake launched two new services.
It’s “Data Sharehouse” enables an enterprise to share any part of its data warehouse in a governed and secure way with any other enterprise. With Snowflake Data Sharing, businesses of any size can now share their live, ready-to-use structured and semi-structured data, and consume the same types of data from other enterprises.
The second service, Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS), is designed for highly regulated industries, such as financial services. VPS provides financial services companies with a cloud architecture that also provides the administrative controls required by large enterprises.
Headquarters: San Mateo, CA
CEO: Bob Muglia. Previously, Bob was president of Microsoft’s $16 billion Server and Tools Business, responsible for products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center and Windows Azure. Following Microsoft, he was EVP of Software and Solutions at Juniper Networks.
Year Founded: 2012
Funding: In April 2017, Snowflake closed a $100 million Series D round of funding led by ICONIQ Capital and accompanied by Madrona Venture Group. The Series D round also included all of Snowflake’s existing funding partners: Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Wing Ventures.
In September 2017, the venture investing arm of Capital One Financial added an additional $5M to the Series D. This brings Snowflake’s total funding to $210M.
Competitors include: Amazon Redshift, Cazena, and plenty of other Big Data and storage startups that will compete with them either directly or indirectly.
Customers include: Accordant Media, Adobe, DoubleDown, Kixeye, Revana, Runkeeper, SOASTA, Transform, Univ. of Notre Dame, and WhiteOps.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: Snowflake is two-time winner! In the past year, Snowflake has rolled out new products, expanded into Australia, raised a boatload of VC money, and announced new reference customers, such as Runkeeper, Transform, and Notre Dame. What’s not to like?
The one mark against Snowflake, which they ended up turning into an advantage, is that they missed getting their entry in early enough to earn a bye past the online voting round (a bye they were eligible for as a Big50-2016 winner). But, no problem, Snowflake simply went out and finished third in their group and in the top five overall.
