Snowflake and Tigera secure funding for data warehousing and cloud app connectivity

A couple of interesting cloudy companies who have raised capital in recent days; Snowflake Computing has closed $263 million in growth funding, while Tigera has secured an additional $10 million in funding.

Snowflake Computing, based in San Mateo, offers cloud-based data warehousing. The company aims to help organisations made their data more easily available and actionable in the cloud, with three claimed elements to help it: a unique architecture to provide complete elasticity, a database engine that natively handles both semi-structured and structured data, and technology which eliminates the need for manual data warehouse management.

The company said it will use the funding to double down on R&D and expand current operations across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions ‘to address the global surge in demand for Snowflake’s data warehouse as a service’. The capital takes Snowflake’s total funding to $473m in growth funding, with a pre-money valuation of $1.5 billion.

Tigera, however, is in the application connectivity and security space. As this publication noted earlier this month, organisations are making more cloud investments and, as a result, their infrastructure becomes more complex. Where Tigera comes in is to make app integration easier as technologies such as containers and microservices are being utilised.

Madrona Ventures Group has a stake in both deals. The Seattle-based firm was named as an existing funding partner who contributed to Snowflake, but was the lead partner in the Tigera round. In a post announcing the news, Madrona managing director S. Somasegar explained its rationale.

“While containers have been the rage for the last 18-24 months, the complexity that grows from this technology quickly escalates to an unmanageable level from an application connectivity and security perspective,” wrote Somasegar. “This conundrum has been an issue for large enterprises as they look to benefit from these new methods of software architecture and management.”

Snowflake’s round was led by ICONIQ Capital, Altimeter Capital and newcomer Sequoia Capital, alongside Capital One Growth Venture, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures, alongside Madrona. CEO Bob Muglia said in a statement the announcement “further validates Snowflake’s continued mission to enable a true data economy by removing the barriers that prevent enterprises from easily acquiring insight from all their data no matter where that data resides.”