Snowflake

Snowflake sells a cloud-based data platform. Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski founded it in 2012. All three had worked on database technology, and the first two came from Oracle. The company is run from Bozeman, Montana, in a distributed setup.

Customers load data into Snowflake and query it with SQL. Storage and computing are separate, so a company can scale each on its own. The service runs on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Snowflake also supports data sharing between organizations and a marketplace where firms can buy or publish datasets. Cortex is its set of tools for running language models on stored data. Its 2020 public offering was one of the largest software listings at the time. Banks, retailers and media firms use it for reporting. Sridhar Ramaswamy became chief executive in 2024 after Frank Slootman retired. The company is known for charging by usage and for a customer conference called Snowflake Summit. It competes with Databricks, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift.