Snowflakes shares begin trading today on the NYSE, with the company raising $3.36bn at a valuation of $33.6bn. This is the largest software IPO of all time.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman received an IPO boost when the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffet, said his Berkshire Hathaway investment business will invest $250m in Snowflake, and Salesforce, an existing investor, is buying another $250m in stock.
Some $1.4bn of VC capital was invested in Snowflake before the IPO and a $479m G-round in February valued the company at $12.4bn.
Snowflake, established in 2012, provides a public cloud-based data warehouse, running on AWS, Azure and Google. Using Snowflake’s cloud facilities means customers can run analytic routines without owning and operating their own data warehouse systems.
