Cloud-based data warehouse service Snowflake just announced a gigantic investment round today, bringing in $263m on a unicorn post-money valuation of $1.5B.
The round was led by a slew of high-profile VC firms — and with total funds raised now topping off at $473m, the company will likely set its sights on an IPO in the near future.
So… what the heck is Snowflake?
Simply put, the 5-year-old company is a digital warehouse service that uses cloud-based technology to store data for some of the largest companies in the world.
While it might not be as sexy as, say, a “smart” doorbell or raw-water startup, Snowflake is actually changing the world, man… At least, in the B2B space.
Now that most companies are at least somewhat familiar wIth the benefits of the almighty cloud, many are packing up the entire legacies of their companies and looking to move them to the cloud.
And they need all that money behind them…
Because they have some pretty stiff competition
With their crazy funding and new unicorn street-cred, Snowflake has the opportunity to be one of the few startups in the space to go head-to-head with gigantic cloud computing competitors like Microsoft, IBM — even the company they were built on, Amazon Web Services.
But Snowflake’s CEO, Bob Muglia, believes the company is going to expand further than just storing legacy workloads. Like the expansion of the Salesforce platform, he foresees companies “building businesses on top of the data stored in their warehouse.”
Talk about one giant hard-drive.