Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based data-warehousing company founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski.
On September 16, the company went public with its IPO listing on the NYSE.
The IPO price range was between $100 to $110 a share, having increased from the initial price range of $75 to $85.
With famous pre-IPO investors that have interest in the company, their involvement among others, made the debut for the company to rise. One of whom, is Warren Buffett.
The famous investor bought in Snowflake to his Berkshire Hathaway, as his rare foray to the tech world, considering that he is known to put interest in more mature companies, like Apple.
As a result of this among others, demand was so high that shares climbed to above $300, for a 150% gain.
At the end of the day, the company managed to sell 28 million shares and raised nearly $3.4 billion from the IPO.
The impressive debut made Snowflake the largest software IPO ever to this date, easily topping the 2007 IPO of DELL-backed VMWare, which raised nearly $1 billion.
At its closing price of just under $254, Snowflake was valued at $70 billion.
This made it more expensive than General Motors, Dell, and Uber.
This also made it worth more than more-established companies in the S&P 500, like Bank of New York Mellon, Hershey, and Allstate, as well as Dow components Walgreens, and Travelers.
Frank Slootman, who has been Snowflake's CEO since May 2019, is no stranger to IPO and in the tech industry. Previously, his first IPO was Data Domain, and his second was ServiceNow.
Snowflake is the third company Slootman made public.
Snowflake that was founded in 2012, operated stealthily at first.
During that time, its main venture-capital backers include Sutter Hill Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Iconiq and Wing Venture Capital. The company raised $26 million.
The company only revealed itself in October 2014, shortly after appointing former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as its CEO that June. The next year in 2015, Snowflake made its cloud data warehouse generally available to the public.
At that time, it already had 80 organizations as clients, and managed to raise an additional $45 million.
The company further raised $100 million in April 2017, $263 million in January 2018, $450 million in October 2018, and $479 million in February 2020.
Snowflake is a company that allows its corporate users to store and analyze data using its cloud-based hardware and software, in a business better known as 'data warehouse-as-a-service. It runs on Amazon S3 since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018, and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019.
The company's name was chosen as a tribute to the founders' love of snow sports.
