Snowflake Inc.
Company History
Snowflake History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones
Founded 2012 in San Mateo, California, United States
When was Snowflake founded?
Snowflake was founded in 2012 in San Mateo, California, United States by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski, making it 14 years old.
- Founded
- 2012
- Founding place
- San Mateo, California, United States
- Founders
- Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski
- Headquarters today
- Bozeman, Montana
- Milestones documented
- 12 (2012–2026)
- Current CEO
- Sridhar Ramaswamy
- Acquisitions
- 5
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Founding of Snowflake |
| 2014 | Emergence from Stealth and Product Launch |
| 2014 | Bob Muglia becomes CEO |
| 2019 | Frank Slootman Becomes CEO |
| 2020 | Historic Initial Public Offering |
| 2021 | Introduction of Snowpark |
| 2022 | Acquired Streamlit |
| 2023 | Neeva Acquired |
| 2024 | Transition of CEO Leadership |
| 2025 | FY2025 Revenue Reaches $3.626 Billion |
| 2026 | Snowflake passes $4.6B in FY2026 revenue |
| 2026 | Observe acquisition closes and growth accelerates |
- Where was Snowflake founded?
- Snowflake was founded in San Mateo, California, United States in 2012. en.wikipedia.org
- Who founded Snowflake?
- Snowflake was founded by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski.
- When did Snowflake start?
- Snowflake was founded in 2012.
- How old is Snowflake?
- Snowflake is 14 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, both data architects at Oracle, and Marcin Żukowski, co-founder of the Vectorwise analytical database, founded Snowflake in San Mateo, California, in July 2012. They set out to build a SQL data warehouse designed for the public cloud rather than adapted from on-premises software. The company worked in stealth, initially backed by Sutter Hill Ventures, and launched publicly in October 2014 with Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft executive, as CEO.
Founders
Benoit Dageville
Benoit Dageville co-founded Snowflake in 2012. Recognizing that legacy on-premise databases were fundamentally incapable of handling the massive scale of the cloud, he helped design Snowflake's revolutionary architecture, which completely separated compute and storage. As President of Products, he ensured the platform remained perfectly cloud-agnostic, running across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Benoit Dageville was born in 1966.
Thierry Cruanes
Thierry Cruanes co-founded Snowflake alongside Benoit Dageville and Marcin Zukowski. As the Chief Technology Officer, he authored much of the highly complex query processing engine that allowed Snowflake to execute massive data analytics workloads exponentially faster than legacy data warehouses. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Marcin Żukowski
Marcin Żukowski was a co-founder of Snowflake, bringing his deep academic and commercial expertise in vectorized query execution. He integrated these advanced processing techniques into Snowflake's cloud-native architecture, ensuring the platform could process massive, complex SQL queries across petabytes of data without degrading performance. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Key Milestones
Founding of Snowflake
Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski founded Snowflake in 2012, working in stealth until October 2014 to build a new database engine from scratch in C++ that would separate compute and storage.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgEmergence from Stealth and Product Launch
Snowflake emerged from stealth in 2014, launching its multi-cloud data warehouse at the Strata + Hadoop World conference, immediately disrupting the market by offering a service that was easier to use, more scalable, and more cost-effective than any existing alternative.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgBob Muglia becomes CEO
Bob Muglia became CEO of Snowflake in 2014. Former Microsoft executive who led Snowflake from its 2014 public launch through its early commercial growth before Frank Slootman replaced him in 2019.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFrank Slootman Becomes CEO
Frank Slootman became Snowflake chief executive in April 2019, succeeding Bob Muglia.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHistoric Initial Public Offering
Snowflake listed on the NYSE under ticker SNOW on September 16, 2020, pricing shares at $120 and raising about $3.4 billion, then the largest software IPO on record. The stock roughly doubled on its first trading day, with Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Ventures among the concurrent private placement buyers.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIntroduction of Snowpark
Snowflake introduced Snowpark in 2021, a developer framework that allows data engineers and scientists to write code in Python, Java, and Scala, marking the company's strategic expansion beyond traditional SQL-based business intelligence into complex data engineering and data science workloads.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAcquired Streamlit
Snowflake acquired Streamlit for $800 million. To rapidly integrate a best-in-class, open-source application framework that allows data scientists to quickly build and deploy interactive data applications and machine learning models directly on top of the Snowflake platform.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTransition of CEO Leadership
Sridhar Ramaswamy became CEO in February 2024, succeeding Frank Slootman, initiating a new era of aggressive product innovation and artificial intelligence integration to capture the next wave of enterprise data workloads.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFY2025 Revenue Reaches $3.626 Billion
Snowflake reported $3.626 billion in consolidated FY2025 revenue, generating $834 million in free cash flow and achieving a non-GAAP operating margin of 24%, demonstrating the extreme operating leverage of its consumption-based model and its successful navigation of the FinOps optimization cycle.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSnowflake passes $4.6B in FY2026 revenue
Snowflake reported FY2026 revenue of $4.684B and Q1 FY2027 revenue of $1.391B as it expanded its data and AI platform.
Source: sec.govObserve acquisition closes and growth accelerates
Snowflake closed its Observe acquisition in May 2026 and on September 2, 2026 reported Q2 fiscal 2027 revenue of $1.55B (+35%), raising FY2027 product revenue guidance to $6.07B.
Source: businesswire.comMajor Acquisitions
Streamlit
2022To rapidly integrate a best-in-class, open-source application framework that allows data scientists to quickly build and deploy interactive data applications and machine learning models directly on top of the Snowflake platform.
Neeva
2023To acquire a team of expert search engineers and integrate their advanced search and discovery technologies into the Snowflake platform, enhancing the ability of customers to find, understand, and govern their data assets.
Observe
2026To add AI-powered observability for logs, metrics and traces built on Snowflake's data platform.
Natoma
2026To provide an enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway so AI agents can connect to business applications with governance and security.
TensorStax
2026To bring agentic AI to data engineering and reduce manual pipeline work.
Keep researching Snowflake
Snowflake Company History FAQ
When and where was Snowflake originally founded?
Snowflake was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California, by French database architects Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, alongside Dutch systems engineer Marcin Żukowski.
What was the revolutionary architectural breakthrough invented by Snowflake's founders?
The founders pioneered the complete architectural separation of compute from storage in database design. Unlike legacy on-premise data warehouses that forced companies to buy bundled hardware, Snowflake stored data cheaply in cloud object storage while scaling compute clusters up, down, or off on demand.
Why did the founders leave Oracle to build Snowflake?
Dageville and Cruanes spent 16 years leading database engine architecture at Oracle. Realizing that existing shared-disk databases could not be retrofitted for public cloud infrastructure, they resigned to design a cloud-native data platform entirely from scratch.
What was the significance of the company's name "Snowflake"?
The founders loved winter sports, and the name "Snowflake" reflected both their passion for skiing and the metaphor that every corporate dataset and query, like a snowflake, is completely unique.
Who was Bob Muglia and what was his role as CEO from 2014 to 2019?
Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft President of Server and Tools, joined as CEO in 2014. Muglia navigated Snowflake out of stealth mode, launched commercial service on AWS, and scaled the business to over $100 million in revenue.
How did Frank Slootman transform Snowflake between 2019 and 2024?
Frank Slootman took over as CEO in May 2019 alongside CFO Mike Scarpelli. Renowned for operational discipline at Data Domain and ServiceNow, Slootman instituted aggressive enterprise sales execution, orchestrated the 2020 IPO, and expanded revenues past $2.8 billion.
When did Snowflake complete its record-breaking initial public offering (IPO)?
On September 16, 2020, Snowflake went public on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker SNOW at $120.00 per share, raising $3.36 billion at a $33 billion valuation—making it the largest software IPO in Wall Street history at the time.
What was Berkshire Hathaway's rare tech investment in Snowflake's IPO?
In a historic departure from Warren Buffett's typical aversion to tech IPOs, Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Ventures each invested hundreds of millions into Snowflake via concurrent private placements alongside the September 2020 IPO.
When did Sridhar Ramaswamy become CEO of Snowflake?
In February 2024, Frank Slootman retired as CEO, and the board appointed Dr. Sridhar Ramaswamy—former Senior VP of Advertising at Google and founder of AI search engine Neeva (acquired by Snowflake in 2023)—to lead Snowflake's generative AI strategy.
What was the impact of the 2024 credential-stuffing security incident?
In mid-2024, cybercriminals used credentials stolen from infostealer malware to access customer accounts that lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA). Snowflake responded decisively by mandating MFA across all customer accounts, implementing advanced threat detection, and reinforcing identity governance.
What is the Snowflake Data Cloud and Secure Data Sharing?
Launched in 2020, the Data Cloud allows organizations to securely share, monetize, and query live data with external partners, suppliers, and customers directly within Snowflake without copying or transferring physical data files.
Where is Snowflake legally and operationally headquartered?
Snowflake operates as a distributed corporate entity with its primary executive office registered in Bozeman, Montana, alongside major engineering and product centers in San Mateo, Bellevue, Berlin, and Warsaw.
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