Benoit Dageville is president of products at Snowflake, the cloud-based database company he cofounded with Thierry Cruanes in 2012.
The French-born computer science PhD got his start at Bull Information Systems before spending 16 years at Oracle in California's Bay Area.
Dageville and Cruanes, both architects at Oracle, teamed up on a startup to store a company's data in the cloud to make it more easily usable.
Snowflake went public in 2020 with a $3.9 billion offering, making it the largest software IPO in history.
The company has been registered in Bozeman, Montana since 2021, but has no official headquarters.
Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud-based data storage company that was headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, it operates a platform that allows for data analysis and simultaneous access of data sets with minimal latency.[1] It operates on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. As of November 2024, the company had 10,618 customers, including more than 800 members of the Forbes Global 2000, and processed 4.2 billion daily queries across its platform.[2]
Snowflake Inc.
Company type Public
Traded as
NYSE: SNOW (Class A)
Russell 1000 component
Founded July 23, 2012; 13 years ago
Founders
Benoît Dageville
Thierry Cruanes
Marcin Żukowski
Headquarters Bozeman, Montana, U.S.
Key people
Frank Slootman (chairman)
Sridhar Ramaswamy (CEO)
Benoît Dageville (president)
Thierry Cruanes (CTO)
Services Cloud data platform
Revenue US$3.63 billion (2025)
Operating income US$−1.5 billion (2025)
Net income US$−1.3 million (2025)
Total assets US$9.03 billion (2025)
Total equity US$3.01 billion (2025)
Number of employees 7,834 (2025)
Website www.snowflake.com
Footnotes / references
Financials as of January 31, 2025.[1]
Snowflake booth
Contents
History
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Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California, by Benoît Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of Vectorwise. Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures, which provided early funding to the company, was the company's first CEO.[3]
In June 2014, Bob Muglia, formerly of Microsoft, was named CEO. In October 2014, Snowflake came out of stealth mode; at that time it was used by 80 organizations.[4][5]
Snowflake has run on Amazon Web Services since 2014,[6][7] on Microsoft Azure since 2018,[8] and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019.[9][10]
In June 2015, Snowflake launched its first product, its cloud data warehouse.[11]
In May 2019, Frank Slootman, formerly CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO.[9]
In June 2019, the company launched Snowflake Data Exchange.[12]
In December 2020, the company added Knoema as a data provider in the Snowflake Data Marketplace.[13]
In May 2021, the company became a distributed company, with a principal executive office in Bozeman, Montana.[14]
In October 2022, the company acquired a 5% stake in advanced TV advertising firm OpenAP.[15]
In May 2023, Snowflake agreed to acquire privacy-focused search startup, Neeva, for $185 million.[16][17]
On February 28, 2024, Frank Slootman retired as CEO and was replaced by Neeva's cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy.[17]
Products
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Snowflake develops and sells a cloud-based data platform known as the Data Cloud. The platform allows organizations to unify data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, and data sharing into a single service. Snowflake runs on public cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and separates compute from storage for scalable, on-demand analytics.[18]
In 2020, Snowflake introduced Snowpark, a developer framework that enables writing data pipelines and business logic using Java, Scala, and Python directly within Snowflake.[19]
In 2021, Snowflake launched Unistore, a hybrid workload that combines transactional and analytical operations within the same platform, enabling real-time applications to be built directly on Snowflake.[20]
In 2023, the company introduced the Native App Framework, which allows developers to build, distribute, and monetize applications that run securely within a customer’s Snowflake account.[21]
Snowflake also provides services including Snowpipe for continuous data ingestion and the Snowflake Marketplace, where organizations can access and share live, query-ready datasets.[22]
In 2024, Snowflake launched Cortex, a set of generative AI services embedded into the platform. Cortex includes access to large language models, vector search, and model deployment capabilities, allowing users to build AI-powered applications using SQL or Python.[23]
Snowflake supports workloads such as machine learning, streaming analytics, business intelligence, and unstructured data processing, with integrations for tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Sigma Computing.[24]
2024 data breach
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In 2024, customers of Snowflake were targeted as part of a mass customer data theft and extortion campaign.[25][26][27][28] Data breaches affected Ticketmaster,[29] Advance Auto Parts,[30] Santander Bank, Neiman Marcus, LendingTree, AT&T, Pure Storage, and Bausch Health.[31]
Two men were involved in the hacking conspiracy. Connor Riley Moucka aka Waifu, 25, of Kitchener, Ontario, and John Erin Binns aka IRDev. Moucka was arrested on October 30, 2024; a Washington state court has issued an indictment on charges of conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, extortion, and aggravated identity theft.[32][33][34]
Funding
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In 2012, Snowflake raised $5 million in a Series A round. In October 2014, it raised $26 million.[4]
In June 2015, the company raised $45 million.[35][11][36] It raised $100 million in April 2017.[37][38]
In January 2018, the company raised $263 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a unicorn.[39]
In October 2018, Snowflake raised $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, at a $3.5 billion valuation.[4][40]
On February 7, 2020, the company raised $479 million. At that time, it had 3,400 active customers.[41]
On September 16, 2020, Snowflake became a public company via an initial public offering, raising $3.4 billion in one of the largest software IPOs and the largest to double on its first day of trading.[42][43][44][45][46]
Acquisition
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In June 2025, Snowflake announced its acquisition of Crunchy Data, a provider of cloud-based PostgreSQL services, for approximately $250 million. The acquisition is aimed at strengthening Snowflake’s capabilities in supporting enterprise workloads and enhancing its AI Data Cloud platform, particularly for applications involving artificial intelligence and machine learning.