Snowflake Gets $479M, Reaches Decacorn Status With $12.4B Valuation

Data warehouse startup Snowflake raised $479 million in a new round of funding, bringing the company’s valuation to a whopping $12.4 billion.

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New investors Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures 1 co-led the round, which comes along with a new partnership with Salesforce.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said in an interview with Crunchbase News that the company wasn’t looking to raise money, as it is “well-capitalized” and hasn’t really dipped into the last round it raised. But with the new partnership with Salesforce, it needed to find a way to bring its new partner to the cap table.

“We would not have raised a round if it hadn’t been for the partnership,” Slootman said.

He wouldn’t give details about what the partnership entails (they’ll share more information during its conference in June), but said the vast majority of Snowflake customers are also Salesforce customers, and the startup has been getting requests to work with Salesforce for years.

“At a high level, the partnership is about allowing Salesforce data to very easily, seamlessly, frictionlessly be shared on the Snowflake platform,” he said.

There won’t be any real operational changes with the new funding, Slootman said, but some of the equity will be converted to cash. The company finished its 2019 fiscal year with 174 percent year-over-year revenue growth.

For sure, $479 million is a huge sum to raise, and an impressive valuation–about triple what it was last valued (about $3.9 billion). It also makes Snowflake even more special and rare than a regular old unicorn, as it’s now reached decacorn status.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Snowflake has been steadily increasing its funding amounts until this point. So, in the spirit of nostalgia, let’s take a look back at its funding history.

The Money

Snowflake raised just under $1 million ($900,000 to be exact) in a 2012 seed round, before securing its $5 million Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures in August 2012. Its Series B came a little over two years later in October 2014, with $26 million in a round led by Redpoint. You can see its funding history below in a neat chart made by our own Jason D. Rowley.

The company netted $79 million in a Series C round led by Altimeter Capital in June 2015, before it started raising supergiant rounds (we define those as rounds of $100 million or larger).

Snowflake raised a $105 million Series D led by ICONIQ Capital in September 2017, with a post-money valuation of about $500 million, according to Crunchbase. It reached unicorn status around the time of its $263 million Series E in January 2018. According to Crunchbase, the company had a pre-money valuation of $1.2 billion at the time.

The rounds have only continued to get bigger with Snowflake’s last round being a $450 million Series F led by Sequoia Capital in October 2018.

So what’s next for Snowflake? Slootman said an IPO would be next, but the company is in no hurry. The earliest Snowflake could go public would be July, but that doesn’t mean they will then.

“We’re very focused on the content itself, which means the data, and driving high-value data assets onto the platform, which is what we view Salesforce to be,” Slootman said. “That data is very valuable, not all data is created equal.”

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias