Snowflake Raises $26M, Introduces Cloud-based Elastic Data Warehouse

Snowflake Computing is coming out of stealth mode with a big name CEO, new venture capital financing, and a plan to reinvent the data warehouse for the cloud.

Redpoint Ventures led the Series B funding round, with participation from Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. This round brings the company’s total financing to date to $26 million.

Snowflake said it plans to use the new financing to expand its engineering and sales organization, and scale the company by putting in place the right systems and teams.

“We are working closely with partners in the data warehousing space, particularly companies that provide business intelligence and extract-transform load solutions to customers,” said Bob Muglia, CEO at Snowflake. “We are also engaging with systems integrator partners to help customers migrate their data analysis solutions to the cloud.

Muglia, who worked at Microsoft (MSFT) for more than 23 years, believes it’s a little too soon for Snowflake to consider additional funding, but he expects to “stay in-touch with potential investors in the venture capital community.”

John Walecka, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, has joined the Snowflake board of directors. Snowflake’s board also includes Mike Speiser, managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures.

The San Mateo, California-based company said on Tuesday it’s reinventing the data warehouse for the cloud through Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the company’s flagship solution that brings together both transactional and machine-generated data by decoupling data storage from compute.

“There is a huge opportunity to bring together both the transactional business data and the machine generated data, but today’s products make that extremely difficult,” he said. “Snowflake change that by providing a cloud solution that works with all business data.”

Some of Snowflake’s competitors in the data warehousing space include traditional on-premises  products from vendors such as Teradata and Oracle (ORCL), and Amazon (AMZN) Redshift, which hosts traditional data warehousing infrastructure on the cloud.

“Data warehousing is a $10 billion market that is growing rapidly,” Muglia said. “Our goal is to build the best product on the planet to meet the data warehousing needs of our customers.”

He added: “That will keep us plenty busy for the rest of this year — and into 2015.”

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