Snowflake raises $479 billion in funding, but Salesforce partnership key

February 08, 2020

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Snowflake, a cloud data management and warehousing platform, has raised $479 million in venture funding for a valuation of more than $12.7 billion, but the real win is a partnership with investor Salesforce.

The company’s latest round of funding was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and joined by Salesforce Ventures, a new investor. Previous investors are also expected to join in the round.

Snowflake gets new CEO: ServiceNow vet Slootman replaces Muglia

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said the partnership with Salesforce will cover product, marketing and go-to-market strategy. More details about the Salesforce partnership are expected to be announced in June at Snowflake’s annual user conference.

Here’s why the Salesforce partnership matters:

Salesforce is trying to position itself as the center of your customer data warehouse with MuleSoft being the integration glue with all other enterprise systems. Snowflake bills itself as a neutral party among cloud giants making a play for enterprise data share. The two companies have mutual aims. At Dreamforce, Salesforce executives outlined the road to doubling revenue in fiscal 2025. “We have partnered with all the other major companies, and we are working to build a set of relationships,” said co-CEO Marc Benioff. “We realize you do have more than Salesforce, and we commit to you we will work with everybody. We will not create boundaries between us… We will operate as one community.” Salesforce adds Customer 360 tools to unify, authenticate and govern data
Snowflake executives will tell you they have no competitors, but they compete with cloud data platforms from Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Should Salesforce acquire Snowflake down the line it will have a data analytics stack where it can combine Snowflake, Einstein and Tableau. The Salesforce Ventures investment is a nice way to kick the tires on Snowflake.
Customers could use some better integration with analytics and data platforms. Here’s a look at how Salesforce connects to Snowflake today. It’s not a stretch to think that there will be some native product and data management integration between Salesforce and Snowflake.