Snowflake, the cloud database start-up filed documents for a confidential IPO at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is aiming to be valued as high as $20bn during an initial public offering.
Snowflake was aiming to go public in the summer but could wait until September or October, depending on market conditions, said people briefed on the discussions.
The company, which has hired Goldman Sachs to advise on the IPO, had already received interest from investors looking to buy shares, a person briefed on the matter said.
“All our sources have confirmed that they filed using the JOBS Act approach,” said R “Ray” Wang, founder and CEO of Constellation Research.
Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based data-warehousing startup that was founded in 2012. It has raised more than $1.4 billion in venture capital, and is based in San Mateo, California. It was publicly launched by Bob Muglia in 2014 after two years in stealth mode.
Snowflake Inc founder are Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski, CEO Frank Slootman In February 2020, Snowflake raised $479 million in VC funding led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures, which raised the vendor’s valuation to more than $12.4 billion.
“Snowflake, I believe, has been looking at an IPO for a few years now,” said Noel Yuhanna, analyst at Forrester Research. “They have had a steady revenue streamline for a while, and many large Fortune companies have been using it for critical analytical deployments. Based on our inquiries, it’s the top data warehouse that customers have been asking about besides Amazon Redshift.”
Snowflake, which announced an enhanced strategic partnership with Salesforce this month, has said it has more than 2,000 customers including JetBlue Airways Corp., Accor SA and Conagra Brands Inc.
Bloomberg first reported Snowflake had filed for an IPO.
