Cloud computing startup Snowflake Computing filed for an IPO on Monday, revealing its financial data for the first time as the company prepares to go public.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said it more than doubled revenue to $242 million in the first half of 2020, with a net loss of $171.3 million, down from $177 million in 2019.
Snowflake’s data warehouse is a specialized type of cloud database built for analytical applications. The company has more than 3,100 customers including Brex, ConAgra Foods, Domino’s, JetBlue, and Nationwide. It has more than 20 offices worldwide, including a Seattle hub, and is one of the most valuable private tech startups in the world.
Founded in 2012, Snowflake sits in a unique position among other cloud service providers, partnering with giants such as Amazon and Microsoft but also competing against them.
In its IPO filing, Snowflake listed Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform under potential risk factors to the business. All three competitors offer their own data warehousing service.
Snowflake said a substantial majority of its business runs on AWS. From the filing:
“There is risk that one or more of these public cloud providers could use their respective control of their public clouds to embed innovations or privileged interoperating capabilities in competing products, bundle competing products, provide us unfavorable pricing, leverage its public cloud customer relationships to exclude us from opportunities, and treat us and our customers differently with respect to terms and conditions or regulatory requirements than it would treat its similarly situated customers. Further, they have the resources to acquire or partner with existing and emerging providers of competing technology and thereby accelerate adoption of those competing technologies. All of the foregoing could make it difficult or impossible for us to provide products and services that compete favorably with those of the public cloud providers.”
Longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia previously led Snowflake as CEO for five years but stepped down in May 2019. Frank Slootman, who ran ServiceNow as chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2017, now leads the company.
Slootman owns 5.9% of the company while Muglia owns 3.3%, according to the IPO filing. The largest shareholder is Sutter Hill Ventures with a 20.3% stake.
Dragoneer Investment Group — a backer of Airbnb, Slack, Spotify, Uber and other giants — led a $479 million Series G round in February and Salesforce Ventures participated for the first time. That round valued Snowflake at $12.4 billion.
Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is another investors, though it is not listed in IPO documents as the firm owns less than 5% of the company. Other backers include Altimeter; ICONIQ Capital; Redpoint Ventures; and Sequoia.
Snowflake was one of five tech companies to file for IPOs on Monday alone as tech IPOs continue despite the ongoing pandemic and economic crisis. Many companies have traded higher since debuting on the public markets over the past several months.
Software startups that filed for IPOs *today*:
– Snowflake
– Unity
– JFrog
– Sumo LogicAnd now: Asana https://t.co/bcnC63kp5E
— Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) August 24, 2020
