Co-founder profile

Thierry Cruanes: Snowflake Co-Founder

The Oracle data architect behind the Snowflake engine

Thierry Cruanes is one of the three co-founders of Snowflake. The company was founded on 23 July 2012 in San Mateo, California. Cruanes is French and worked as a data architect at Oracle before the start-up.

His partners were Benoit Dageville, also a former Oracle data architect, and Marcin Zukowski, who had co-founded the Dutch database company Vectorwise. Together they set out to build a data warehouse for the cloud.

The key design choice was to separate compute from storage. Customers could then scale up and down as needed. Sutter Hill Ventures seeded the company and put in a $5M Series A in 2012.

Snowflake named Bob Muglia CEO in 2014 and Frank Slootman in May 2019. The company went public in September 2020 and raised $3.4B, the largest software IPO to that point.

Read the full Snowflake founder story

What is Thierry Cruanes known for?

Thierry Cruanes is a co-founder of Snowflake, the cloud data platform started in July 2012 in San Mateo, California. He had worked as a data architect at Oracle before that.

What is Thierry Cruanes' nationality?

Thierry Cruanes is French. He built the Snowflake engine with fellow Oracle veteran Benoit Dageville and Marcin Zukowski, who co-founded Vectorwise.

How did Thierry Cruanes start Snowflake?

He teamed up with Benoit Dageville and Marcin Zukowski in 2012 to build a data warehouse designed for the cloud from scratch. It separates compute from storage so customers can scale each one up or down.