What is Snowflake? Snowflake Review

Founder of Snowflake

Founder and CEO Bob Muglia worked at Microsoft for 23 years and has extensive database experience. Later, he served as executive vice president at Juniper.

Snowflake Company Introduction

Snowflake was founded in San Francisco, California in 2012 and has clients including Condé Nast, Accordant Media, Adobe, VoiceBase and others.

Snowflake Basic Introduction

Snowflake provides cloud-based data warehouse services for storage and query, and analysts can then use business intelligence (BI) tools to analyze data. Cloud-based data warehouse deployment eliminates the need to set up related software and hardware, lowering the threshold for use. In addition, Snowflake's technology can also automatically tune the database. These can lower the threshold for using data warehouses.

Operational Model

In terms of sales model, Snowflake has innovated from the conventional subscription model to a pay-per-service model. The prospectus shows that 95% of its revenue is charged by the number of services. In addition, Snowflake does not charge in advance, but settles after the fact, and large customers are mainly settled monthly or quarterly.

On the technical level, Snowflake separates data storage and data processing, allowing users to choose service levels more flexibly and quickly increase or decrease the number of nodes according to demand.

In terms of customers, Snowflake currently has 3,117 customers, a year-on-year increase of 101%. This is due to its architectural optimization, which allows users to easily exchange data with other users on the Snowflake platform, which has led to a continuous increase in the number of Snowflake users.

With innovative operating models, Snowflake has achieved year-on-year growth in performance. However, despite the high growth, Snowflake has not yet made a profit. The prospectus shows that Snowflake's operating loss in the first half of 2020 was US$174 million and its net loss was US$171 million.

Judging from the data, Snowflake's net loss is narrowing significantly, from 170% to 71%. Even though Snowflake's net loss is large, considering its expansion speed and current market development, the current loss level is acceptable to investors.

Snowflake Advantages

Snowflake has more than 120 patents in database and data processing. Its Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is a new type of data warehouse built on cloud services that can centralize all users, data and loads on a SQL data warehouse. Users only need to load data and run queries to find various structured or semi-structured data.

Snowflake Pricing Plans

Snowflake Financing

In March 2013, Snowflake Computing received US$6 million in Series A financing.

In October 2014, Snowflake just received $20 million in Series B funding. This round of financing was led by Redpoint Ventures and followed by Sutter Hill Ventures. Part of the proceeds from this round of financing will be used to build a partner ecosystem and expand the team size.

In June 2015, Snowflake announced that it had received $45 million in Series C funding, led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Wing VC. So far, the company's total financing has reached $71 million. The company intends to use this funding to expand its team, and it plans to recruit several engineers, with a focus on expanding its sales team in the United States.

In April 2017, Snowflake Computing announced that it had received $100 million in Series D financing, led by Iconiq and participated by Madrona Venture Group.

In January 2018, Snowflake Computing announced that it had received $26.3 billion in financing, with this round of financing jointly led by Iconiq Capital, Altimiter Capital and Sequoia Capital, and participated by existing investors such as Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. This will promote the further development of its cloud data storage business, and the company's current valuation has reached $1.5 billion.

In October 2018, cloud data storage startup Snowflake received $263 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from new investor Meritech Capital and existing investors including Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures Iconiq, Capital and Wing Ventures.