Snowflake did not begin with a pitch deck. It began with a conversation, at least in the version one investor account tells: a job offer was turned down, and the investor, Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures, was curious enough about the person who said no to keep talking. Accounts disagree on who offered what to whom, which is itself a lesson in how companies get started.
The founders were three database engineers. Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes had been data architects at Oracle, the company whose warehouse software defined the market. Marcin Zukowski had co-founded Vectorwise, a Dutch database company. Their birthplaces and schools are not documented in the sources read here, so the story rests on their craft.
Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes had been data architects at Oracle, the company whose warehouse software defined the market.
What they shared was a conviction that the data warehouse needed rebuilding for the cloud. Older systems tied storage and computing together, so customers paid for capacity they rarely used. A Chinese-language account says Dageville first dismissed Speiser's own idea, but the team converged on separating compute from storage. Snowflake was incorporated on 23 July 2012 in San Mateo. Sutter Hill put in $5 million. The name was chosen to reflect the founders' love of snow sports.
The unusual move was handing over the steering wheel. Speiser served as the first chief executive. After the first product in 2014, the company recruited Bob Muglia, a longtime Microsoft executive, as CEO so the founders could work on the engine. In May 2019 Frank Slootman, who had run ServiceNow, took over. Slootman retired on 28 February 2024, and Sridhar Ramaswamy succeeded him.
Money followed the product. A $263 million round in January 2018 valued the company at $1.5 billion, and a $450 million round led by Sequoia that October valued it at $3.5 billion. In September 2020 the company went public, raising $3.4 billion, one of the largest software IPOs and the largest to double on its first day.
Then came the quieter years. In May 2021 Snowflake became a distributed company with its principal office in Bozeman, Montana, and by 2025 it had moved its headquarters back to California. For the year ended 31 January 2026 it reported revenue of about $4.7 billion and a net loss of about $1.33 billion. The market value was around $95 billion on 6 November 2026.
The founders built the technology and let others run the business. That is rare among engineers, and it is why Snowflake became large. If you are a technical founder, the harder question is not whether you can build it, but when you should hand it to someone who can sell it.