Madrona Venture Group’s S. Somasegar and Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia previously worked together as Microsoft executives. (Madrona Venture Group Photo)

Cloud data-warehousing company Snowflake Computing is about to raise a $270 million Series E funding round that would catapult the company into unicorn status, according to a report.

The Information reported late Wednesday that Snowflake’s pending round from existing investors, including Iconiq Capital and Madrona Venture Group, would value the company at $1.5 billion, crossing the $1 billion unicorn bar less than a year after Snowflake raised a $105 million Series D funding round. A Snowflake representative emphasized that the company has not closed any funding rounds since the one last year, but declined to comment on whether or not Snowflake was in the process of raising more money.

Snowflake, which has raised $210 million to date without including this pending round, makes a data warehouse designed for the cloud-native era. Data warehouses are more or less the same as regular databases, but they are designed for analytical applications and to emphasize reading data over writing data.

In a recent interview with GeekWire, Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, a longtime Microsoft veteran, explained that Snowflake’s approach is gaining traction in part because it allows cloud software vendors to bypass query limits common to other databases. Companies using older database products could run into trouble trying to close a quarter, for example, which requires them to look up a lot of data in a short period of time.

“With Snowflake, they don’t have that problem because now they, literally every Friday afternoon, they throw multiple warehouses against it and they get the whole thing done in just a few hours,” Muglia said on the sidelines of AWS re:Invent 2017 in November.

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