Petroc Taylor
Research expert covering global developments in the use of data
Snowflake Inc. - statistics & facts
With one of the largest software initial public offerings (IPO) in history, the U.S. firm Snowflake is cloud success story. Behind the stock market buzz lies a highly successful product - a unified cloud data platform that enables customers to easily access, analyze, and share their data. Founded in 2012 and publicly launched in 2014, Snowflake has grown to become one of the world’s largest cloud vendors by revenue as of 2023. The company reported revenue of over 2.8 billion U.S. dollars in its financial year ending January 31, 2024, up from almost 2.1 billion the previous year, though has posted consecutive net losses since going public in 2020. Snowflake’s workforce has grown rapidly in recent years, with its headcount exceeding seven thousand in late 2024.
Snowflake seeks to tackle data silos
Snowflake describes its platform as powering what it terms the “data cloud.” The term refers to an ecosystem in which organizations store and access single, live copies of their data, and can seamlessly share this data with other organizations on the cloud. Snowflake pitches its platform as a solution to the use of “silos” in data storage, wherein organizations store data in standalone data warehouses which can be difficult to access and in which data is often needlessly replicated. The Snowflake platform is intended to offer all necessary tools and services to work within the data cloud, including analytics, governance, and cybersecurity tools, and thus reduces the need for supplementary database software.IPO and public cloud
Snowflake attracted significant attention in the run-up to its September 2020 IPO, with backing from the customer relationship management giant Salesforce as well as billionaire investor Warren Buffet. Snowflake’s value at IPO was 33.2 billion U.S. dollars, ranking it among the highest-valued unicorn exits in the United States, while the firm’s share price had more than doubled to 254 U.S. dollars by the end of the first day of trading. In total, the Snowflake IPO raised 3.4 billion U.S. dollars.Though many analysts tipped Snowflake for long-term financial success amid its high-profile IPO, the firm faces significant competition in an increasingly congested cloud market. Microsoft leads the market by revenue, with cloud revenue of 28.5 billion U.S. dollars during its fourth fiscal quarter of 2023, followed by competing tech giant Amazon. Rather than launch its own private cloud, Snowflake has opted for increased integration by making its service available on the three major public cloud services operated by big tech: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, thus maximizing its viability moving forwards.
