Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based data-warehousing company that was founded in 2012. it’s based in San Mateo California. It had been publicly launched by Bob Muglia in 2014 after two years in stealth mode. In Snowflake’s own words, from its S-1 filing:
“Our platform solves the decades-old problem of information silos and data governance. Leveraging the elasticity and performance of the general public cloud, our platform enables customers to unify and query data to support a good sort of use cases. It also provides frictionless and governed data access so users can securely share data inside and outdoors of their organizations, generally without copying or moving the underlying data. As a result, customers can blend existing data with new data for broader context, augment data science efforts, or create new monetization streams. Delivered as a service, our platform requires near-zero maintenance, enabling customers to specialise in deriving value from their data instead of managing infrastructure.” Snowflake offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed “data warehouse-as-a-service”. It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. Snowflake runs on Amazon S3 since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018, and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019. Its Snowflake Data Exchange allows customers to search out, exchange, and securely share data.
Snowflake spans the world and is headquartered within the heart of the Silicon Valley, with quite 2,000 employees working in 19 countries.
Where did it all begin?
The company was founded in 2012 yet came out of stealth mode in 2014. When considering launch, Snowflake could be a very young company of only six years old.
In 2012, three data warehousing experts -Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski came together and build the utter town now “Snowflakes”. To everyone wondering how the name came into existence as a tribute to the founders’ love of snow sports. Snowflake came out of stealth mode in October 2014 shortly after appointing former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO that June. The cloud data warehouse became generally available in June 2015 and had 80 organizations using it at that point. As of February 9, 2020, Snowflake had 3,400 active customers, including Capital One, Rent the Runway and Adobe.
In May 2019, Frank Slootman joined Snowflake as its new CEO. In October 2019, Slootman said during a London conference that Snowflake might pursue an initial public offering early summer of 2020, but this got pushed back due to various factors.
Its been a graph up since 2012 for Snowflake
Business and technology publications have recognized Snowflake over the years for our product innovation and workplace culture and to the foremost recent within the bag, Snowflake won the worldwide technology partner award for innovation in Qlik Partner Award. Being within the business Snowflake has been awarded multiple honors over the year like one amongst the most effective places to figure, Snowflake was identified as a “Cool Vendor” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and won first place at the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World startup competition. Snowflake was listed as No. 2 on Forbes magazine’s Cloud 100 list in 2019 and was ranked No. 1 on LinkedIn’s 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups. “We’re competing against a number of the biggest companies on the earth, Microsoft and Amazon and Google, IBM, Teradata. Even with this sum of money, they still have a bit bit over we do,” Muglia said.
Let’s Talk Money
On September 16, 2020, Snowflake made an IPO at $120 a share which over doubled in value giving it a market valuation of $70.4 billion by the very best of its first day of trading, with shares closing at $253.93, selling 28 million shares and raising $3.4 billion, making it the most important software IPO and also the largest IPO to double on its first day of trading to the current point.
Snowflake Inc’s shares over doubled in their any exchange debut on Wednesday, each day after the Warren Buffett-backed data warehouse company raised quite $3 billion within the largest U.S. listing of the year to date.
Snowflake’s spectacular market debut reflects the hearty appetite for brand new stocks, as low-interest rates drive investors into equities.
The market overlooked Snowflake’s losses, that specialize in the prospects of its software business of knowledge sharing. Perhaps because the corporate delivered sky-high revenue growth last year of 173% and 121% within the most up-to-date quarter with a record-breaking net retention rate of 158% — which is that the highest of any public cloud company at the time of listing.
Among U.S.-listed companies with a market capitalisation of a minimum of $10 billion, only three companies are now dearer than Snowflake’s 2020 revenue multiple. It lags only Nikola Corp, Liberty Broadband, and Immunomedics Inc, in step with Refinitiv. Snowflake sold 28 million shares in its IPO to lift $3.36 billion within the biggest software IPO of all time.
The new CEO, Frank Slootman, clearly knows the way to make an organization attractive to investors. Not only did the corporate quickly tighten its belt in respect to net losses, but the corporate also doubled customers from 1,547 to 3,117 over the past twelve months. This includes 7 of the Fortune 10 and 146 of the Fortune 500
Early investors in the company will win big with the historic IPO. Among the biggest beneficiaries:
- Sutter Hill Ventures, which led the $5 million Series A in Aug. 2012
- Altimeter Capital, which led the $79 million Series C in June 2015
- Iconiq Capital, which led the $105 million Series D in Sept. 2017
- Redpoint Ventures, which led the $26 million Series B in Oct. 2014
- Sequoia Capital, which led the Series F in Oct. 2018
Here’s a breakdown of how many shares each currently owns:
- Sutter Hill Ventures: 49,564,848 shares (17.4 percent) of Class B common stock
- Altimeter Capital: 36,286,307 shares (15.1 percent) of Class B common stock
- Iconiq Capital: 33,752,048 shares (14 percent) of Class B common stock
- Redpoint Ventures: 21,928,585 shares (9.1 percent) of Class B common stock
- Sequoia Capital: 20,619,156 shares (8.6 percent) of Class B common stock. Take a look back at the company’s funding and valuation history here:
