Snowflake raised a new round, why?

Snowflake, the reference for cloud analytics, just raised a new VC round with $479M for its Series G. The post-money valuation reaches $12.$B. The total raised a new record at $1.4B. One of the interesting investor for this round is Salesforce...

So why the company needs to raise so much?

• The first idea that come to our mind is to resist to a potential hostile acquisition and stay independent as long as the exec team, board and investors wish.
• The second point is related to the desire to control it sown destiny at its own pace while staying private. The difficulty to grow fast becoming attractive with the power to say no to any acquisition bid could also a motivation.
• The level of VC money at his valuation means also that IPO has to be delayed with real strategy around the IPO valuation. With today more than $12B, beating this is a challenge. IPO means also the wish to raise a round but publicly from the market.
• We can also anticipate some M&As directions for the coming months to aggregate technologies to the portfolio.

At the end we know it's just a question of price but this new round is still mystery.