Snowflake secures $450m funding for expansion and further multi-cloud exploration

The money just keeps rolling in for Snowflake Computing. The San Mateo-based data warehousing provider has announced $450 million (£341m) in additional growth funding to help grow its organisation and explore new strategies.

Snowflake offers a comprehensive and complete data warehouse – in other words, repositories of integrated data from at least one source, usually more – in the cloud, with the capability to upload and analyse data to offer business intelligence capabilities. The company’s secret sauce is in its patented architecture, which offers benefits such as near-linear scale-out.

Funding for this round was led by Sequoia Capital – whose other investments have included Cohesity, Docker and Skyhigh Networks – as well as including participation from Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Aside from Meritech, the remainder were all previous investors.

Among the company’s plans for the funding include growing its sales and engineering teams across the US and globally, as well as expanding its multi-cloud strategy. Snowflake had been available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since its inception – but compatibility with Microsoft Azure was announced back in July. At the time, the company said the move came about because of customer demand – and with the company’s first value being to ‘always put the customer first’, it will be interesting to see how this progresses from here.

This is not Snowflake’s first funding round of the year; as this publication reported in January, the company secured $263 million in growth funding with a pre-money valuation at the time of $1.5 billion. This time round, the company’s valuation is at $3.5bn.

“Learning to be data-driven is an imperative for every organisation today, and a data-driven organisation must be in control of its data,” said Bob Muglia, Snowflake CEO 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 organisations.

“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,” added Muglia.