Snowflake

Data Warehouse

Snowflake was founded in July 2012 by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski—three data architects with roots at Oracle and Vectorwise.

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Cloud data platform that separates storage and compute, enabling teams to run analytics, build AI agents, and share governed data across clouds.

Snowflake was founded in July 2012 by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski—three data architects with roots at Oracle and Vectorwise. The company pioneered cloud data warehousing on a separated storage and compute model, allowing organizations to scale independently. Based in Bozeman, Montana, Snowflake went public on September 16, 2020, listing on the NYSE at $120 per share and opening at $245, a 112% pop.

Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce each committed $250 million in concurrent purchases, validating the company's position as infrastructure for enterprise data. Under former CEO Frank Slootman (who led ServiceNow and Nutanix public before Snowflake), the company scaled to $3.6 billion in annual revenue by fiscal year 2025. In March 2024, Slootman stepped down and appointed Sridhar Ramaswamy—a Google senior VP and co-founder of AI search startup Neeva—as CEO.

Ramaswamy has pivoted Snowflake aggressively toward agentic AI, launching Snowflake Intelligence (conversational data agents for non-technical users), Cortex Code (an AI coding assistant that understands enterprise data context), and a $200 million multi-year partnership with OpenAI announced in February 2026. Revenue for fiscal 2026 reached $4.68 billion, up 29 percent year-over-year, with 606 customers generating more than $1 million in annual product revenue and 754 Forbes Global 2000 companies on the platform. Net revenue retention stands at 124 percent.

The company owns a net loss position, reporting $1.3 billion in fiscal 2025 losses, reflecting R&D spend on AI capabilities. Snowflake competes head-to-head with Databricks (still private, valued at $43 billion) and has made 13 acquisitions in three years, including Crunchy Data for approximately $250 million in June 2025 to offer managed PostgreSQL. Notable customers include Adobe (with 1,000+ joint customers), Zoom, and Airbnb. The stock has recovered from April 2026 lows, up 62 percent, though down from its November 2021 all-time high of $401.89.

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Products by Snowflake

Who buys this

  • Financial services firms using Cortex AI for risk analytics and customer intelligence
  • Enterprise retailers running cross-cloud analytics and real-time BI on shared customer data
  • Tech and SaaS companies building agentic AI workflows for operations and customer service
  • Healthcare providers consolidating multicloud data for compliance-governed AI applications
  • Fortune 2000 manufacturers centralizing supply chain and operational data for analytics and agents

Publicly disclosed clients

  • Adobe
  • Zoom
  • Airbnb

Strengths and what to watch

Strengths

  • Strong network effects and NRR of 124-126% in FY2025-2026, with 606 customers at $1M+ ARR and 754 Forbes 2000 accounts
  • Cortex AI suite tightly integrated with governance and Iceberg/Polaris open-source standards, reducing vendor lock-in risk
  • $200M OpenAI partnership gives direct access to frontier models within Cortex, differentiating on cost and latency vs. cloud-provider intermediated access

Watch for

  • Persistent net losses ($1.3B in FY2025) despite 29% revenue growth; profitability timeline under Ramaswamy remains unclear
  • CEO transition risk: Ramaswamy is six months into agentic AI bet; if Cortex Code and Intelligence adoption falters, Databricks (also AI-focused, private) could win developer mindshare
  • Competitive pricing pressure from open-source Iceberg/Delta Lake adoption and Databricks' continued private-market momentum at ~$2.4B ARR

Recent moves

Key Information

Industry
Data Warehouse
Founded
2012
Employees
5001-10000
Headquarters
Bozeman, MT

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud data platform that separates storage and compute, allowing organizations to run analytics, build AI agents, and share governed data across clouds. Founded in 2012 by three data architects, it went public in 2020 and now serves over 750 Fortune 2000 companies.

How does Snowflake's separated storage and compute model work?

Snowflake decouples storage from compute, letting organizations scale each independently. This architecture enables teams to pay only for what they use, spin up multiple compute clusters simultaneously, and run analytics or AI workloads without impacting other operations, reducing costs and improving flexibility.

What is Cortex AI?

Cortex AI is Snowflake's suite of agentic AI tools integrated with governance and open-source standards. It includes Cortex Code, an AI coding assistant that understands enterprise data context, and Cortex Intelligence for conversational data agents. The suite powers analytics, risk assessment, and customer intelligence workflows across industries.

What is Snowflake's OpenAI partnership?

In February 2026, Snowflake announced a $200 million multi-year partnership with OpenAI. The deal grants Snowflake customers direct access to frontier AI models, including GPT-5.2, through Cortex AI. This partnership differentiates Snowflake on cost and latency compared to cloud-provider intermediated access to advanced models.

How does Snowflake compare to Databricks?

Snowflake and Databricks both offer cloud data platforms focused on analytics and AI, but differ in approach. Snowflake emphasizes governance-integrated agentic AI through Cortex and OpenAI partnerships. Databricks, still private at $43 billion valuation, focuses on lakehouse architecture and open-source Delta Lake, competing heavily on developer adoption.

How much revenue does Snowflake generate?

Snowflake reported $4.68 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue, up 29 percent year-over-year. The company has 606 customers generating over $1 million annually and 754 Forbes Global 2000 companies on its platform. Net revenue retention stands at 124 percent, indicating strong customer expansion despite $1.3 billion net losses in fiscal 2025.

How Snowflake compares

Direct head-to-head against 3 competitors. Picked by 7wData.

This company

Snowflake

Positioning
Cloud data platform that separates storage and compute, enabling teams to run analytics, build AI agents, and share governed data across clouds.
Customer segments
Financial services firms using Cortex AI for risk analytics and customer intelligence
Strengths
Strong network effects and NRR of 124-126% in FY2025-2026, with 606 customers at $1M+ ARR and 754 Forbes 2000 accounts
Watch for
Persistent net losses ($1.3B in FY2025) despite 29% revenue growth; profitability timeline under Ramaswamy remains unclear
Recent moves
Snowflake and OpenAI Forge $200M Multi-Year Partnership for Enterprise AI

Databricks

Positioning
Open lakehouse platform unifying data analytics and AI, challenging Snowflake on SQL performance while targeting AI-native workloads.
Customer segments
Large enterprises and Fortune 500 firms. Buyers are Directors and VPs of Data Engineering in regulated industries needing unified analytics and AI.
Strengths
Unity Catalog governs structured data, unstructured data, and ML models under one policy layer, avoiding fragmented governance across tools.
Watch for
Customers consistently underestimate total cost by 50-200% because Databricks billing stacks on top of separate cloud provider infrastructure invoices.
Recent moves
March 2026: acquired Quotient AI, a Boston-based AI evaluation and development platform, expanding production AI agent capabilities.

Google BigQuery

Positioning
Serverless data warehouse deeply embedded in GCP, positioned as the SQL-native alternative to Snowflake for GCP-committed enterprises.
Customer segments
Large enterprises in retail, finance, and transportation. Primary buyer: data engineering and analytics leaders at GCP-invested organizations.
Strengths
Serverless autoscaling with no cluster management, processing over 110 terabytes per second without manual tuning.
Watch for
Cost unpredictability: query and storage costs scale opaquely, making budget control difficult without expert query optimization.
Recent moves
Workday selected Google Cloud as Data Cloud partner (November 2025), enabling zero-copy BigQuery access for HR and finance analytics.

Amazon Redshift

Positioning
AWS-native data warehouse for enterprises already standardized on AWS, competing on ecosystem integration over platform portability.
Customer segments
Large enterprises (1,000+ employees) in IT, software, and financial services. Buyers are data engineering heads and cloud architects on AWS.
Strengths
Zero-ETL native replication from 17 AWS sources (Aurora, DynamoDB, Kinesis) into Redshift without pipeline overhead.
Watch for
Pricing complexity and misconfigured clusters drive unexpected costs. 37% of users cite lack of product know-how, nearly double market average.
Recent moves
April 2026: Redshift Serverless defaulted AI-driven scaling for all new workgroups, expanding base RPU range from 32-512 to 8-512.

Sources

  1. www.snowflake.com — FY2025 revenue ($3.626B, 29% growth), customer counts (580 customers >$1M ARR, 745 Forbes 2000), NRR (126%), RPO ($6.9B)
  2. www.cnbc.com — IPO details: Sept 16 2020, priced at $120, opened at $245, closed at $253.93 (112% pop), raised $3B
  3. www.snowflake.com — $200M OpenAI partnership (Feb 2, 2026), GPT-5.2 access via Cortex AI, 12,600 global customers
  4. www.cnbc.com — Crunchy Data acquisition (~$250M, June 2025), Crunchy Data customers (UPS, Kyndryl, DHS), $30M annualized revenue
  5. fortune.com — Sridhar Ramaswamy background (Google, Neeva), CEO appointment (Feb/March 2024), AI strategy and weekly war rooms
  6. www.businesswire.com — Q1 FY2026 results (May 21, 2025): $1.0B revenue (26% growth), 606 customers >$1M ARR, NRR 124%