In the digital world of today, data storage is essential, but what’s more, cloud storage is paramount!

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing company based in California. Snowflake offers a software as a service model, which requires little maintenance, helping customers to focus on getting value from their data.

Benoit and Thierry, the masterminds behind Snowflake, have a history of a very strong friendship and are absolutely adorable!

It is the storage of structured and unstructured data that Snowflake excels at, and it is this combination that makes it so appealing. Customers only pay for the processing units they utilize since computing is paid based on processing units (also known as "credits" by Snowflake). The cost of storing your belongings is a separate expense.

Read the remarkable story about how two inventors with a common passion for data created a cloud data platform from the ground up that transformed the world.

Bromance Turned into Alliance

Once upon a time, in a nation famed for its exquisite art and fine architecture, Benoit and Thiery were born. Thiery was (and still is) fascinated by data and computer science. Thiery and Benoit not only liked big data, but they also liked each other. It's referred to as a bromance.

Benoit Dageville, born June 29, 1966, is a French computer scientist, billionaire, and co-founder of this Californian unicorn. As in, a private company with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, not the mythical creature. He earned a doctorate in computer science from the University of Paris 6 in 1995, after defending a doctoral thesis on the parallel processing of queries to database systems.

Benoit worked at the European Computer-Industry Research Center (ECRC) for two years before moving on to Bull2. He joined Oracle in Redwood Shores, California, in January 1996. During his 16 years with Oracle, he met and grew very fond of his “bro” - Thierry.

He knew he couldn't do it alone, and he needed Thierry because the duo always had the most brilliant ideas. And, on top of all of that, Thierry is the most positive person Benoit knows.

Thierry Cruanes, born in 1967, is a Snowflake co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO). Same as Benoit, Thierry attended the University of Paris 6. He defended his doctoral thesis on computer science and holds over 40 patents, a quite impressive undertaking. Among other duties, Thierry is also a board member at Snowflake.

The Future Is Bright

Snowflake Inc. was incepted in July 2012, in Benoit’s apartment in San Mateo, California. After creating the company, Thierry and Benoit invited Marcin Żukowski, a co-founder of the Dutch firm Vectorwise, to help them with creating the database.

The company’s first CEO was Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist from Sutter Hill Ventures.

For two whole years, the company operated in stealth mode, meaning Snowflake undertook a temporary state of secrecy to avoid alerting competitors to their pending project. After receiving their first funding, and appointing former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO in 2014, the company got out of stealth mode.

Jumping over hurdles, digging deep, going high and low, Benoit and Thierry have had their fair share of adversity. But, dusting themselves off and trying again garnered so much experience for the inventors. Being skilled and knowledgeable in the fieldwork, Benoit and Thierry had set the foundations for a bright future.

The First Cash Injection

Snowflake received its first seed funding in February 2012, a hefty $900 000. Five months later, they received a Series A venture worth $5 million. Using these funds, Benoit and Thierry operated in a temporary state of secretiveness for two years.

In October 2014, a Series B Early Stage Venture of $26 million got Snowflake out of the shadows, and the company started operating publicly.

It released its first product - its cloud data warehouse - a year later, after raising $79 million from lead investor Altimeter Capital. That same year, 80 organizations started using Snowflake’s services.

From a Speck to a Snowflake

Snowflake became a unicorn company in January 2018, when it disclosed a $263 million fundraising round at a $1.5 billion value. By the way, in business, a unicorn is a privately owned company whose value exceeds $1 billion.

At Snowflake Summit on June 4, 2019, the company's inaugural user conference, Snowflake introduced an all-new shared data experience, the Snowflake Data Exchange.

The Data Exchange is a free-to-join marketplace where Snowflake clients may connect with data from suppliers to find, access, and produce insights. This product helped the company secure a lot of customers that further aided the Snowflake financial revolution.

Snowflake’s Initial Public Offering

Snowflake went public on September 16, 2020, with a $3.4 billion initial public offering, making it the biggest software IPO and the largest IPO to date to double on its first day of trade. Snowflake is trading at much more than 70 times this year's revenues, making it one of the most expensive technology companies on the market.

It even got the attention of the most successful investor in the whole wide world, you know who - Warren Buffett. Even though Mr. Buffett doesn’t like investing in stock IPO’s cause he knows good business when he sees one! In this case, he made an exception and invested $570 million in Snowflake. And that’s a lot of pennies to count, folks.

Snowflake Today

Currently, Snowflake has a principal executive office in Bozeman, Montana.

The company has 2,495 employees with 60 different employee profiles and 12 board members. Frank Slootman acts as Chairman and CEO, Benoit is the President, and Thierry Cruanes is the CTO.

In 2020, the company’s revenue went up to $592 million out of which $539 million are net income. Snowflake’s total assets are worth a staggering $5.921 billion, out of which $4.936 billion are in equity.

Snowflake clients together have moreover 250PB (that’s petabytes) of data handled by the Data Cloud, with over 515 million data jobs running every day!

According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ Study, Snowflake clients may expect a 612 percent ROI and overall benefits of more than $21 million over the course of three years.

How Snowflake managed to get ahead of its competitors, is by making their data warehouse speedy, easy, cost-effective, and elastic. It is the opposite of most of the other data warehouses, which are rigid, expensive, and difficult to use.

What’s Next for Snowflake?

There is little doubt that Snowflake has the ability to continue to expand its presence in the cloud data industry. Snowflake anticipates that the number of larger customers will increase from 77 in fiscal 2021 to approximately 1,400 in fiscal 2029 and that the average revenue from those top customers will increase from $3.4 million to $5.5 million over the same period.

Their main concern at the moment is maintaining the price of their stock (a pretty expensive one) because of its decline in the market. Furthermore, Snowflake is focused on gaining more of the big companies to use their data services, having already served more than 200 of the Fortune 500 companies.

All of the above will surely be a challenge, but luckily for Benoit and Thierry - that is what they love most and thrive on.

The Final Footprint

It is safe to say that Snowflake is among the top 5 cloud data platforms in the world. Rest assured, they didn’t make it to the top on a whim. And considering their utter customer care, their overall mission as well as their worldwide recognition and contribution, based on the utmost integrity - they sure didn’t come this far just to come this far!