Snowflake Computing Raises $450M In Growth Funding Round

Cloud data warehouse service provider Snowflake Computing has closed on $450 million in new funding, the company's second round of financing this year.

The new funding brings the company's total financing to $923 million and raises the company's market valuation to $3.5 billion, the company said Thursday.

The new funding round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation by Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.

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Snowflake will use the new funding to continue to develop its data warehouse-as-a-service by expanding the engineering teams at its San Mateo, Calif., headquarters; and its engineering offices in Bellevue, Wash. and Berlin, Germany, the company said. It also plans to grow its sales teams both within the U.S. and internationally.

“Learning to be data-driven is an imperative for every organization today, and a data-driven organization must be in control of its data,” Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia said in a statement. “Snowflake is the most powerful data warehouse in the world for analytics solutions. That power delivers the security, control and business answers needed to enable data-driven organizations. This is driving spectacular growth for our company, and this latest funding round will provide Snowflake with the resources we need to serve our rapidly growing set of new and existing customers around the world.”

Snowflake said it now has more than 1,000 active customers, including Netflix, Office Depot, Netgear and Yamaha. The privately held company has not disclosed its sales numbers or financial results.

While small and midsize businesses have been quick to make use of Snowflake's cloud services, Matt Glickman, customer and strategy vice president, said in an interview with CRN that the company has seen a "huge uptick" in the number of Fortune 500 companies that have become Snowflake customers.

The data warehouse market is expected to grow by more than 40 percent, from $14 billion last year to $20 billion in 2020, Snowflake said, citing IDC forecasts.

On-premise data warehouse systems can be complex and expensive to build. Snowflake's value proposition is that its cloud-based data warehouse service can be implemented much more quickly, can be scaled up or down as needed, and is more easily adaptable to changing needs and conditions.

Snowflake has run its data warehouse services on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform since mid-2015. Last month, it began offering the service on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

Snowflake works with solutions partners, including systems integrators such as Cognizant and solutions providers like Intricity, as well as technology partners including Tableau, Looker, Informatica and Databricks. Glickman said that in addition to growing Snowflake's sales force, the new funding will be used to expand the company's partner ecosystem.

Last week Snowflake opened an East Coast headquarters in New York.