Snowflake leads the pack by far...

Snowflake, the emerging leader in cloud data warehouse, just announced a new monumental VC round of $450M that pushes the bar to a total of $928.9M at a pre-money valuation of $3.5B coming from $1.7B post-money last January. It means that the company boosted almost $2B its valuation in 9 months. And the current post-money is obviously almost $4B that doubles that 2018 valuation increment! Led by Sequoia Capital, joined by Meritech Capital as new all existing investors joined this round realizing that the opportunity is fantastic and the hope of high return important. Referring to my last post about Snowflake, I said that nothing will happen below 10x the total investment so I'm pretty confortable to say below $10B, go home.

From left to right: Thierry Cruanes Founder Architect, Bob Muglia CEO,
Benoît Dageville Co-founder & CTO and Marcin Zukoswki Co-founder (Credit Snowflake)

We had the privilege to meet and visit Snowflake at their San Mateo HQ during the last IT Press Tour in June and all the press team were impressed by the team, the product, the vision and globally by the maturity of the strategy.

Snowflake plays in a new category, the Cloud Data Warehouse, having built a new highly scalable database for analytics, like Amazon Redshift, acquired from ParAccel before Actian bought the company in 2013 or GCP BigQuery. It is the only ISV in the leader quadrant, the 2 others are cloud service providers. Some competition come from more classic approaches as well and we wonder what will the Cloudera/Hortonworks merge bring on the table. Microsoft tries to offer something named Azure SQL Datawarehouse but with very limited success.

Fueled by this last round, the coming strategy includes multi-cloud and we expect sooner and later a release on GCP, in other words this population can't be ignored, sales geo expansion, this is pretty classic, and engineering growth, in USA and Berlin, this is interesting to notice in order to continue to lead and drive that market segment.

The Snowflake story is fantastic and it's always good to shake the palm and disrupt the market to offer new approaches for users. Congrats. We hope to meet Snowflake again for a future edition as things are going super fast.