Benoit Dageville is a French database engineer. After Bull Information Systems he spent about 15 years at Oracle, working on parallel execution in Oracle RAC and on SQL manageability. In 2012 he left with his colleague Thierry Cruanes to build a data warehouse designed for the cloud.
Snowflake was founded on 23 July 2012 in San Mateo, California, with Marcin Zukowski as third co-founder. Sutter Hill Ventures put in a $5 million Series A that year. The first product shipped in 2014, when Bob Muglia was named CEO.
The founders stepped back from running the company. Frank Slootman became CEO in May 2019, and Snowflake went public in September 2020 in what was then the largest software IPO, raising $3.4 billion. Forbes reported that the IPO made the three founders billionaires. Slootman retired on 28 February 2024 and Sridhar Ramaswamy succeeded him.
Dageville remains at Snowflake as president of products. The company reported revenue of $4.68 billion for fiscal 2026, which ended on 31 January 2026, with a net loss of about $1.33 billion. Its market value was $95.09 billion on 6 November 2026, according to companiesmarketcap.com.