Snowflake was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski — three data warehousing experts who wanted to build a cloud-native data platform from scratch. Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana (with major offices in San Mateo), Snowflake went public in September 2020 in the largest software IPO at that time, with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway among its investors.
The platform’s architecture separates storage, compute, and services into independent layers, letting customers scale each independently. This was a major departure from traditional data warehouses and made Snowflake popular with organizations that needed flexible, elastic data processing without managing infrastructure.
Snowflake’s revenue exceeded $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2024, and the company serves over 9,800 customers, including 639 of the Forbes Global 2000. The Data Cloud concept — the idea that organizations can securely share and monetize data across Snowflake accounts — has been a key differentiator.
The company has faced intensifying competition from Databricks, Google BigQuery, and other platforms. In response, Snowflake has expanded into areas like Snowpark (developer experience for data engineering in Python, Java, and Scala), Cortex (AI/ML features), and Streamlit (acquired in 2022 for data app development). After founder-CEO Frank Slootman retired in 2024, Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as CEO, bringing a focus on AI workloads and developer experience.
