Snowflake Computing, a San Mateo, Calif.-based developer of a cloud-based data warehouse, has announced a new $263 million fundraising round.
A trio of big name Silicon Valley venture capital firms invested in the round, including existing investors ICONIQ Capital and Altimeter Capital, alongside new investor Sequoia Capital.
The six-year-old company calls itself the only data warehouse built for the cloud. Snowflake’s services help big businesses make their data more readily available for use in the cloud. Customers first upload their data to Snowflake’s data centers, cutting time down from a couple of days to hours, and then plug the data into business intelligence tools that offer insights for better decision making. The latest investment brings Snowflake’s total capital raised to $473 million at a whopping $1.5 billion unicorn valuation.
Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Muglia suggests that the latest round may be the last before a potential initial public offering. “We have put ourselves on the path to IPO. That’s our mid- to long-term plan. This funding allows us to go directly to IPO and gives us sufficient capital, that if we choose, IPO would be our next funding step,” said Muglia, a former Microsoft executive who joined the startup in 2014.
The cloud-based data warehouse service provider says investors were drawn to its solid revenue growth, which has tripled or better year-over-year, along with its user growth, up from 450 customers in April to over 1,000 currently. Snowflake’s client list includes leaders across industries such as Capital One, Adobe, Nielsen and Rent the Runway.
The firm will use the funding to head off against a growing number of players attempting to capitalize on the widespread shift from on premise data centers to the cloud.
“The money gives us the ability to compete against the alternatives that customers are looking at and these are the richest companies in the world: Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google,” said Snowflake’s CEO.
Within the year, the enterprise SaaS provider expects to nearly double its employee base from 330 people to about 600.
