Snowflake Inc.

Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud computing–based data cloud company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode.

The firm offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data-as-a-service". It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. The Snowflake service's main features are separation of storage and compute, on-the-fly scalable compute, data sharing, data cloning, and support for third-party tools. It has run on Amazon Web Services since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018 and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019. The company was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019. The company's initial public offering raised $3.4 billion in September 2020, one of the largest software IPOs in history.

History
Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California by three data warehousing experts: Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise. The company's first CEO was Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures.

In June 2014, the company appointed former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO. In October 2014, it raised $26 million and came out of stealth mode, being used by 80 organizations. In June 2015, the company raised an additional $45 million and launched its first product, its cloud data warehouse, to the public. It raised another $100 million in April 2017. In January 2018, the company announced a $263 million financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a unicorn. In October 2018, it raised another $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion.

In May 2019, Frank Slootman, the retired former CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO and Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of ServiceNow joined the company as CFO. In June 2019, the company launched Snowflake Data Exchange. In September 2019, it was ranked first on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups.

On February 7, 2020, the company raised another $479 million. At that time, it had 3,400 active customers. On September 16, 2020, Snowflake became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO) raising $3.4 billion, one of the largest software IPOs and the largest to double on its first day of trading.

On May 26, 2021, the company announced that it would become headquarterless, with a principal executive office located in Bozeman, Montana.

On March 2, 2022, the company acquired Streamlit for $800 million. Then on October 17, 2022, the company announced an investment in advanced TV advertising firm OpenAP.

Snowflake announced it would acquire privacy-focused search startup Neeva for $185 million in May 2023.

On October 23, 2023, Snowflake acquired a start-up named Ponder to expand its Python capabilities for enterprises.

On February 28, 2024, Snowflake announced that Slootman was retiring and Sridhar Ramaswamy would be replacing him as CEO.

2024 Data Breach
In 2024, a massive hack of Snowflake customers resulted in data breaches of Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts (over 2.3 million records affected), Santander Bank, LendingTree, AT&T (call logs and cell site locations from over 100 million mobile customers), and others. Lists of customer logins were available in hacking forums; those without multi-factor authentication were affected. In an investigation by Mandiant it was confirmed that credentials for Snowflake customer accounts were obtained by an info-stealing malware tracked as Frostbite, that affected non-Snowflake owned systems.

Mandiant linked the attack to the UNC5537 group, and believe the breach began on April 14, 2024.