Thanks to this major fundraising, Snowflake will be able to extend its data warehouse as an international service, continue to develop its technology and increase the number of its engineering team by focusing on the development of his new operations in Bellevue, Washington .

Snowflake, a cloud-growing cloud data startup

According to Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, the startup is growing wild. That's why the time has come for the firm to expand. This fundraising demonstrates investors' keen interest in enterprise technologies that are natively developed in the cloud .


This additional $ 100 million for the total financing of the startup to $ 205 million . Previous investors Altimeter Capitals, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures also participated in this Series D fundraiser.

The participation of Madrona as a new investor is a meeting between Muglia and S. Soma Somasgar , managing director of Madrena who worked with for many years Muglia at Microsoft. Somasegar ran the developer division of Microsoft, while Muglia was president of the Server & Tools branch.

Madrona seduced by Snowflake for many reasons

Madrona usually invests earlier in the startups that interest her. However, according to Somasegar, this investment is very strategic for the firm, for several reasons. First of all, the group is particularly interested in startups entirely dedicated to activities in the cloud . For good reason, the cloud represents a huge market with strong growth internationally.

The confidence Muglia and leaders Snowflake has also motivated the decision to Madrona . Snowflake was founded in 2012 by Oracle veterans Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, and by Marcin Zukowskin inventor of a vector query execution system within databases. The engineering director, Sameet Agrawal, also spent many years as director of the SQL Server Relational Database Engine at Microsoft. In addition, Snowflake's new Bellevue office will allow Madrona to add value to the business given its presence in the Seattle area .

Even though Snowflake's cloud data warehouse is running on AWS , it is competing with Amazon's Redshift data warehouse. This situation is not extraordinary in the modern world of the cloud . In a publication about his fundraising, Madrona cites a GigaOm report that Snowflake is one of the best cloud analytics databases ahead of Google BigQuery, Teradata, Azure Data Warehouse, and AWS Redshift.

The future looks bright for Snowflake

According to Muglia, this new financing will allow the company to expand its sales, recruit more employees in the US, while covering new regions such as Europe and Asia . Snowflake already has sellers in London and plans to expand in Europe this year.

In Bellevue, the company trained a team of four engineers and a product manager . Thereafter, it expects to have a total of 10 to 15 engineers this year, and up to 50 or 100 engineers in the long term.