Snowflake
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Industry experts say it’s full speed ahead as Snowflake files S-1
When Snowflake filed its S-1 ahead of an upcoming IPO yesterday, it wasn’t exactly a shock. The company which raised $1.4 billion had been valued at $12.4 billion in its last private raise in February. CEO Frank Slootman, who had taken over from Bob Muglia in May last year, didn’t hide the fact that going public was the end game.
When we spoke to him in February at the time of his mega $479 million raise, he was candid about the fact he wanted to take his company to the next level, and predicted it could happen as soon as this summer. In spite of the pandemic and the economic fallout from it, the company decided now was the time to go — as did 4 other companies yesterday including J Frog, Sumo Logic, Unity and Asana.
If you haven’t been following this company as it went through its massive private fund raising process, investors see a company taking a way to store massive amounts of data and moving it to the cloud. This concept is known as a cloud data warehouse as it it stores immense amounts of data.
While the Big 3 cloud companies all offer something similar, Snowflake has the advantage of working on any cloud, and at a time where data portability is highly valued, enables customers to shift data between clouds.
We spoke to several industry experts to get their thoughts on what this filing means for Snowflake, which after taking a blizzard of cash, has to now take a great idea and shift it into the public markets.
Pandemic? What pandemic?
Big market opportunities usually require big investments to build companies that last, that typically go public, and that’s why investors were willing to pile up the dollars to help Snowflake grow. Blake Murray, a research analyst at Canalys says the pandemic is actually working in the startup’s favor as more companies are shifting workloads to the cloud.
“We know that demand for cloud services is higher than ever during this pandemic, which is an obvious positive for Snowflake. Snowflake also services multi-cloud environments, which we see in increasing adoption. Considering the speed it is growing at and the demand for its services, an IPO should help Snowflake continue its momentum,” Murray told TechCrunch.
Leyla Seka, a partner at Operator Collective, who spent many years at Salesforce agrees that the pandemic is forcing many companies to move to the cloud faster than they might have previously. “COVID is a strange motivator for enterprise SaaS. It is speeding up adoption in a way I have never seen before,” she said.
It’s clear to Seka that we’ve moved quickly past the early cloud adopters, and it’s in the mainstream now where a company like Snowflake is primed to take advantage. “Keep in mind, I was at Salesforce for years telling businesses their data was safe in the cloud. So we certainly have crossed the chasm, so to speak and are now in a rapid adoption phase,” she said.
So much coopetition
The fact is Snowflake is in an odd position when it comes to the big cloud infrastructure vendors. It both competes with them on a product level, and as a company that stores massive amounts of data, it is also an excellent customer for all of them. It’s kind of a strange position to be in says Canalys’ Murray.
“Snowflake both relies on the infrastructure of cloud giants — AWS, Microsoft and Google — and competes with them. It will be important to keep an eye on the competitive dynamic even although Snowflake is a large customer for the giants,” he explained.
Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna agrees, but says the IPO should help Snowflake take on these companies as they expand their own cloud data warehouse offerings. He added that in spite of that competition, Snowflake is holding its own against the big companies. In fact, he says that it’s the number one cloud data warehouse clients inquire about, other than Amazon RedShift. As he points out, Snowflake has some key advantages over the cloud vendors’ solutions.
“Based on Forrester Wave research that compared over a dozen vendors, Snowflake has been positioned as a Leader. Enterprises like Snowflake’s ease of use, low cost, scalability and performance capabilities. Unlike many cloud data warehouses, Snowflake can run on multiple clouds such as Amazon, Google or Azure, giving enterprises choices to choose their preferred provider.”
Show them more money
In spite of the vast sums of money the company has raised in the private market, it had decided to go public to get one final chunk of capital. Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy says that if the company is going to succeed in the broader market, it needs to expand beyond pure cloud data warehousing, in spite of the huge opportunity there.
“Snowflake needs the funding as it needs to expand its product footprint to encompass more than just data warehousing. It should be focused less on niches and more on the entire data lifecycle including data ingest, engineering, database and AI,” Moorhead said.
Forrester’s Yuhanna agrees that Snowflake needs to look at new markets and the IPO will give it the the money to do that. “The IPO will help Snowflake expand it’s innovation path, especially to support new and emerging business use cases, and possibly look at new market opportunities such as expanding to on-premises to deliver hybrid-cloud capabilities,” he said.
It would make sense for the company to expand beyond its core offerings as it heads into the public markets, but the cloud data warehouse market is quite lucrative on its own. It’s a space that has required a considerable amount of investment to build a company, but as it heads towards its IPO, Snowflake is should be well positioned to be a successful company for years to come.
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Sutter Hill strikes ice-cold, $2.5B pre-market return with Snowflake’s IPO filing
Today is the day for huge VC returns.
We talked a bit about Sequoia’s coming huge win with the IPO of game engine Unity this morning. Now, Sequoia might actually have the second largest return among companies filing to go public with the SEC today.
Snowflake filed its S-1 this afternoon, and it looks like Sutter Hill is going to make bank. The long-time VC firm, which invests heavily in the enterprise space and generally keeps a lower media profile, is the big winner across the board here, coming out with an aggregate 20.3% stake in the data management platform, which was last privately valued at $12.4 billion earlier this year. At its last valuation, Sutter Hill’s full stake is worth $2.5 billion. My colleagues Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm looked a bit at the financials of the IPO filing.
Sutter Hill has been intimately connected to Snowflake’s early build-out and success, providing a $5 million Series A funding back in 2012, the year of the company’s founding, according to Crunchbase.
Now, there are some caveats on that number. Sutter Hill Ventures (aka “the fund”) owns roughly 55% of the firm’s total stake, with the balance owned by other entities owned by the firm’s management committee members. Michael Speiser, the firm’s partner who sits on Snowflake’s board, owns slightly more than 10% of Sutter Hill’s stake directly himself according to the SEC filing.
In addition to Sutter Hill, Sequoia also got a large slice of the data computing company: its growth fund is listed as having an 8.4% stake in the coming IPO. That makes for two Sequoia Growth IPOs today — a nice way to start the week this Monday afternoon.
Finally, Altimeter Capital, which did the Series C, owns 14.8%; ICONIQ owns 13.8%; and Redpoint, which did the Series B, owns 9.0%.
To see the breakdown in returns, let’s start by taking a look at the company’s share price and carrying values for each of its rounds of capital:
On top of that, what’s interesting is that Snowflake broke down the share purchases by firm for the last four rounds (D through G-1) the company fundraised:
That level of detail actually allows us to grossly compare the multiples on invested capital for these firms.
Sutter Hill, despite owning large sections of the company early on, continued to buy up shares all the way through the Series G, investing an additional $140 million in the later-stage rounds of the company. Adding in the entirety of its $5 million Series A round and a bit from the Series B assuming pro rata, the firm is looking on the order of a 16x return (assuming the IPO price is at least as good as the last round price).
Outside Sutter Hill, Redpoint has the best multiple return profile, given that it only invested $60 million in these later-stage rounds while still maintaining a 9.0% ownership stake. Both Sutter Hill and Redpoint purchased roughly 20% of their overall stakes in these later-stage rounds. Doing some roughly calculating, Redpoint is looking at a return of about 12-13x.
Sequoia’s multiple on investment is capped a bit given that it only invested in the most recent funding rounds. Its 8.4% stake was purchased for nearly $272 million, all of which came in these late-stage rounds. At Snowflake’s last round valuation of $12.4 billion, Sequoia’s stake is valued at $1.04 billion — a return of slightly less than 4x. That’s very good for mezzanine capital, but nothing like the multiple that Sutter Hill or Redpoint got for investing early.
Doing the same back-of-the-envelope math and Altimeter is looking at a better than 6x return, and ICONIQ got 7x. As before, if the stock zooms up, those returns will look all the better (and of course, if the stock crashes, well…)
One final note: The pattern for these last four funding rounds is unusual for venture capital: Snowflake appears to have “spread the love around,” having multiple firms build up stakes in the startup over several rounds rather than having one definitive lead.
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A quick peek at Snowflake’s IPO filing
Snowflake filed to go public today joining a bushel of companies making their S-1 documents public today. TechCrunch has a longer digest of all the IPO filings coming soon, but we could not wait to get into the Snowflake numbers, given the huge anticipation that the company has generated in recent quarters.
Why? Because the cloud data warehouse company has been on a fundraising tear in recent years, including a $450 million Series F in late 2018 and a $479 million Series G in February of this year. The latter round valued the mega-unicorn at around $12.5 billion. More on this later.
Snowflake is, then, one of the world’s most valuable former startups that is still private. Its public debut will make a splash. But what did its $1.4 billion in capital raised (Crunchbase data) build? Let’s take a peek at the numbers.
Growth
Even glancing at the Snowflake S-1 makes it clear what investors are excited about when it comes to the big-data storage service: Its growth. In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.
More recently, the company’s growth has remained impressive. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, Snowflake’s revenue was $104.0 million. A year later, those two quarters generated revenues of $242.0 million. That’s growth of 132.7% on a year-over-year basis. Impressive, and just the sort of top line expansion that private investors want to staple their wallet to.
So, lots of growth. But how high-quality is the revenue?
Margins
Let’s take a look at the company’s gross margins over different time periods. The data will help us better understand the company’s value, and its gross margin improvement, or impairment over time. Given Snowflake’s soaring valuation over time, we are expecting to see improvements as time passes:
- Fiscal year ending January 31, 2019: 46.5%
- Fiscal year ending January 31, 2020: 56.0%
- Six months ending July 31, 2019: 49.4%
- Six months ending July 31, 2020: 61.6%
Et voilà ! Just like we expected, improving gross margins over time. Recall that the higher (stronger) a company’s gross margins are, the more of its revenue it gets to keep to cover its operating costs. Which is, notably, where the Snowflake story goes from super-exciting to slightly harrowing.
Let’s talk losses.
Losses
In no way does Snowflake’s operations pay for themselves. Indeed, the company is super unprofitable on both an operating and net basis.
In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, Snowflake lost $178.0 million on a net basis. A year later the figure swelled to $348.5 million. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, the company’s net loss was $177.2 million. In the same two quarters of this year, it was slightly lower at $171.3 million.
And that’s why the company is probably trying to go public. Now that it can point to falling net losses as its revenues grow and its gross margins improve, you can chart a path to break-even. And Snowflake’s operations are burning less cash over time. The pace was north of $50 million a quarter in the two three-month periods ending July 31, 2019, for example.
And even more, if we look inside the last two quarters, the most recent period (three months ending July 31, 2019) is larger than the one preceding it in revenue terms ($133.1 million versus $108.8 million), and its net loss is smaller ($77.6 million versus $93.6 million). This lowered the company’s net margin from -86% to -58%. Still bad! But far less bad in short order, which could cut worries about Snowflake’s enormous history of unprofitability at scale.
How we got here
Since Snowflake first appeared in 2012, its ability to take the idea of a data warehouse, a concept that has existed on prem for years, and move into a cloud context had great appeal — and it attracted great investment. Imagine taking virtually all your data and having it in a single place in the cloud.
The money train started slowly at first, with $900,000 in seed money in February 2012, followed quickly by a $5 million Series A later that year. Within a few years investors would be handing the company bundles of cash and the train would be the high-speed variety, first with former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia leading the way, and more recently with former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman in charge.
By 2017 there were rapid-fire rounds for big money: $105 million in 2017, $263 million in January 2018, $450 million in October 2018 and finally $479 million this past February. With each chunk of money came gaudier valuations, with the most recent weighing in at an eye-popping $12.4 billion. That was triple the company’s $3.9 billion valuation in that October 2018 investment.
Telegraphing the inevitable
In February, Slootman did not shy away from the IPO question. Unlike so many startup CEOs, he actually embraced the idea of finally taking his company public, whenever the time was right, and apparently that would be now, pandemic or not.
He actually almost called the timing in a conversation with TechCrunch at the time of the $479 million round:
I think the earliest that we could actually pull that trigger is probably early- to mid-summer time frame. But whether we do that or not is a totally different question because we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not getting pressure from investors.
All money talk aside, at its core, what Snowflake offers is this ability to store vast amounts of data in the cloud without fear of locking yourself in to any particular cloud vendor. While all three cloud players have their own offerings in this space, Snowflake has the advantage of being a neutral vendor — and that has had great appeal to customers, who are concerned about vendor lock-in.
As Slootman told TechCrunch in February:
One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model.
So what?
When it rains it pours. Unity filed. JFrog filed. We still need to talk X-Peng. Corsair has filed as well. And there are still a host of companies that have filed privately, like Airbnb and DoorDash, that could drop a new filing at any moment. What an August!
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Startups are helping cloud infrastructure customers avoid vendor lock-in
For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t always pretty.
As we move deeper into the cloud model, many IT pros are looking for more flexibility than they had in the past, avoiding the vendor lock-in from the previous generation of enterprise tech, and what being beholden to a single vendor could mean for the bottom line and their own flexibility.
This is something that comes up frequently in discussions about moving workloads from one cloud to another, and is sometimes referred to as a multi-cloud approach. Customers are loath to leave their workloads in the hands of one vendor again and repeat the mistakes of the past. They are looking to have the same flexibility on the infrastructure side that they are getting in the SaaS world, where companies tend to purchase best-of-breed from multiple vendors.
That means, they want the freedom to move workloads between clouds, but that’s not always as easy a prospect as it might seem, and it’s an area where startups could help lead the way.
What’s the problem?
What’s stopping customers from just moving data and applications between clouds? It turns out that there is a complex interlinking of public cloud APIs that help the applications and data work in tandem. If you want to pull out of one public cloud, it’s not a simple matter of just migrating to the next one.
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After $479M round on $12.4B valuation, Snowflake CEO says IPO is next step
Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse company, doesn’t tend to do small rounds. On Friday night word leaked out about its latest mega round. This one was for $479 million on a $12.4 billion valuation. That’s triple the company’s previous $3.9 billion valuation from October 2018, and CEO Frank Slootman suggested that the company’s next finance event is likely an IPO.
Dragoneer Investment Group led the round along with new investor Salesforce Ventures. Existing Snowflake investors Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The new round brings the total raised to over $1.4 billion, according to PitchBook data.
All of this investment begs the question when this company goes public. As you might expect, Slootman is keeping his cards close to the vest, but he acknowledges that is the next logical step for his organization, even if he is not feeling pressure to make that move right now.
“I think the earliest that we could actually pull that trigger is probably early- to mid-summer timeframe. But whether we do that or not is a totally different question because we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not getting pressure from investors,” he said.
He grants that the pressure is about allowing employees to get their equity out of the company, which can only happen once the company goes public. “The only reason that there’s always a sense of pressure around this is because it’s important for employees, and I’m not minimizing that at all. That’s a legitimate thing. So, you know, it’s certainly a possibility in 2020 but it’s also a possibility the year thereafter. I don’t see it happening any later than that,” he said.
The company’s most recent round prior to this was $450 million in October 2018. Slootman says that he absolutely didn’t need the money, but the capital was there, and the chance to forge a relationship with Salesforce also was key in their thinking in taking this funding.
“At a high level, the relationship is really about allowing Salesforce data to be easily accessed inside Snowflake. Not that it’s impossible to do that today because there are lots of tools that will help you do that, but this relationship is about making that seamless and frictionless, which we find is really important,” Slootman said.
Snowflake now has relationships with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and has a broad content strategy to have as much quality data (like Salesforce) on the platform. Slootman says that this helps induce a network effect, while helping move data easily between major cloud platforms, a big concern as more companies adopt a multiple cloud vendor strategy.
“One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model,” he said.
Slootman says investors want to be part of his company because it’s solving some real data interchange pain points in the cloud market, and the company’s growth shows that in spite of its size, that continues to attract new customers at high rate.
“We just closed off our previous fiscal year which ended last Friday, and our revenue grew at 174%. For the scale that we are, this by far the fastest growing company out there…So, that’s not your average asset,” he said.
The company has 3400 active customers, which he defines as customers who were actively using the platform in the last month. He says that they have added 500 new customers alone in the last quarter.
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Snowflake co-founder and president of product Benoit Dageville is coming to TC Sessions: Enterprise
When it comes to a cloud success story, Snowflake checks all the boxes. It’s a SaaS product going after industry giants. It has raised bushels of cash and grown extremely rapidly — and the story is continuing to develop for the cloud data lake company.
In September, Snowflake’s co-founder and president of product Benoit Dageville will join us at our inaugural TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event on September 5 in San Francisco.
Dageville founded the company in 2012 with Marcin Zukowski and Thierry Cruanes with a mission to bring the database, a market that had been dominated for decades by Oracle, to the cloud. Later, the company began focusing on data lakes or data warehouses, massive collections of data, which had been previously stored on premises. The idea of moving these elements to the cloud was a pretty radical notion in 2012.
It began by supporting its products on AWS, and more recently expanded to include support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
The company started raising money shortly after its founding, modestly at first, then much, much faster in huge chunks. Investors included a Silicon Valley who’s who such as Sutter Hill, Redpoint, Altimeter, Iconiq Capital and Sequoia Capital .
Snowflake fund raising by round. Chart: Crunchbase
The most recent rounds came last year, starting with a massive $263 million investment in January. The company went back for more in October with an even larger $450 million round.
It brought on industry veteran Bob Muglia in 2014 to lead it through its initial growth spurt. Muglia left the company earlier this year and was replaced by former ServiceNow chairman and CEO Frank Slootman.
TC Sessions: Enterprise (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions, like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum computing and blockchain.
Tickets are now available for purchase on our website at the early-bird rate of $395.
Student tickets are just $245 – grab them here.
We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.
For each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.
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Snowflake expands beyond Amazon to Azure cloud
Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, announced a partnership with Microsoft today to expand their offering to the Azure cloud. The new product is still in Preview for now.
Given that Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia worked at Microsoft for more than 20 years, it’s certainly not surprising that Microsoft is the company’s second partner after working with only Amazon since its inception. But Muglia says it was really about seeing customer demand in the marketplace more than any nostalgia or connections at Microsoft. In fact, he says the company is on boarding one to two new Azure customers a day right now.
The plan is to open up a private preview today, then become generally available some time in the fall when they work out all of the kinks involved with porting their service to another provider.
The partnership didn’t happen overnight. It’s been developing for over a year and that’s because Muglia says Azure isn’t quite as mature as Amazon in some ways and it required some engineering cooperation to make it all work.
“We had to work with Microsoft on some of the things that we needed to make [our product] work [on their platform], particularly around the way we work with Azure Blob Storage that we really had to do a little differently on Azure. So there are changes we needed to make internally in our product to make it work,” he explained.
Overall though the two company’s engineers have worked together to solve those issues and Muglia says that when the Azure version becomes generally available in the Fall, it should basically be the same product they offer on Amazon, although there are still some features they are trying to make work on in the Preview. “Our goal is to have literally the same product on Azure as on Amazon, and we are very confident we’ll get there with Microsoft,” he said.
For Snowflake of course, it represents a substantial market expansion because now they can sell to companies working on Azure and Amazon and that has opened up a whole new pipeline of customers. Azure is the number two cloud provider behind Amazon.
The interesting aspect of all this is that Amazon and Microsoft compete in the cloud of course, but Snowflake is also competing with each cloud provider too with their own product. Yet this kind of partnership has become standard in the cloud. You have to work across platforms, then compete where it makes sense.
“Almost all of the relationships that we have in the industry, we have some element of competition with them, and so this is a normal mode of operation,” he said.
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Snowflake lands massive $263 million investment on unicorn valuation
Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse service, announced an enormous investment round today, pulling in a whopping $263 million on a unicorn valuation of $1.5 billion. The round was led by a trio of big-name Silicon Valley VC firms including existing investors Iconiq Capital and Altimeter Capital and new investor Sequoia Capital. Today’s announcement comes on top of the $100… Read More
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Snowflake’s newest cloud data warehouse takes aim at regulated industries
Snowflake, makers of a cloud data warehouse service, announced a new virtual private product that should appeal to highly regulated companies like financial services and healthcare. In fact, the company also announced that one of the product’s earliest customers, Capital One, will be investing $5 million in Snowflake as a strategic investor as a result of this new approach. Most… Read More
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