Snowflake Computing has taken in $479m in a surprise G-series funding with Salesforce as co-lead investor in the cloud data warehousing startup. The monster $12.4bn valuation is more than three times higher than Snowflake’s previous funding round in October 2018.
Frank Slootman, Snowflake CEO, told The Financial Times that company is poised to turn cashflow positive this year. He said revenue grew by 174 per cent last year and would soon top $1bn. The company has raised $1.4bn to date.
In an interview with San Francisco Business Times, Slootman said the company was “not in need of capital at all. This is not a traditional fundraise. It is part of a strategic alliance with Salesforce that we initiated. We wanted to advance our content strategy. We need core data assets, or content, put onto the Snowflake platform and that is why we are doing this.”
Snowflake is preparing an IPO with the earliest possible date this summer.
Slootman said the current $12.4bn valuation will likely be a lot higher following an IPO. “The reason is that our growth trajectory is so fierce and our addressable market is so large,” he told San Francisco Business Times. “When companies grow so fast, as Snowflake has, the valuation may seem like a big number now but not later. When I was with ServiceNow (as CEO), the valuation was $2.5bn when we went out and now it has a $65bn valuation.”
