Longtime tech executive Bob Muglia might just be warming up. The CEO of Snowflake Computing has closed another huge funding round for the database company, which is now valued at well over a billion dollars.
After closing a $263 million Series E round this month, Snowflake has now raised $473 million in total funds at a pre-money valuation of $1.5 billion, the company plans to announce Thursday. Sequoia Capital joined the roster of venture capitalists betting on Muglia, leading the new round with existing investors Iconiq Capital and Altimeter Capital, and with participation from other current investors: Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.
Snowflake built a cloud-based data warehouse that is gaining traction as more and more companies shift legacy workloads into the cloud. In a recent interview, Muglia declined to share the company’s revenue but did say it was in the “tens of millions” and that revenue tripled in 2017 compared to 2016.
That revenue will have to grow significantly if Snowflake is to live up to that valuation, and the company plans to expand across the board, focusing especially on research and development as well as staffing up the sales organization.
“We’re competing against some of the largest companies on the planet, Microsoft and Amazon and Google, IBM, Teradata. Even with this sum of cash, they still have a little bit more than we do,” Muglia said.
The company still has most of the $105 million it raised in 2017 in the bank, Muglia said, but there was a lot of interest in a new fund from new and existing investors, and Snowflake knew it would raise a round at some point over the next year or so. “This should carry us to the point where we could ultimately IPO the company,” he said.
Sequoia, which has guided tech stalwarts such as Apple, Cisco, and Google to successful IPOs, will help Snowflake get in front of tech buyers looking for a cloud-based data warehouse, a type of database that prioritizes analytical queries.
“The biggest thing Sequoia has that will benefit our business in the short run, is they have very strong relationships with executives at tech companies,” Muglia said.
Based in Silicon Valley, Muglia still spends a significant amount of time in the Seattle area after a long career at Microsoft leading enterprise computing business units, including the Windows Server and Tools team. He joined Snowflake in 2014 after a stint at Juniper Networks.
