Snowflake Computing, a startup that sells a cloud-based data warehouse, has $100 million in new funding thanks to ICONIQ Capital and Madrona Venture Group. Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Wing Ventures also participated.
This Series D round brings total backing to $205 million. The company does not discuss its valuation.
Businesses pump all sorts of information from many sources into data warehouses, so that they can analyze it to spot historical trends. Such analyses can help answer questions such as how well a given marketing or advertising campaign worked.
Snowflake’s product, which runs on Amazon Web Services, makes heavy use of that cloud’s Simple Storage Service (S3). It competes with legacy data warehouses from Teradata (TDC) and Oracle (ORCL) as well as Amazon’s (AMZN) own Redshift.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day ’s technology newsletter</em></p> <p>Snowflake will use its new funds to beef up its sales and marketing resources, including opening new sales offices around the world, chief executive Bob Muglia tells Coins2Day. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company has already opened a new sales office in the UK, as well as in Bellevue, Wash.
“When Snowflake first started selling about two years ago, most buyers were companies that had already made the decision to go to the cloud and had a lot of data to manage. They were mostly in media, advertising, and online gaming. In those cases we competed a lot with Redshift,” Muglia said.
Now Snowflake sells more frequently to companies that run most of their applications on premises and are now migrating them to cloud services. Such companies typically use data warehouses from Oracle or Teradata.
“If you’re selling a Teradata or Oracle replacement, you need sales people, “Muglia says. Traditional enterprise software companies, unlike their younger web-based rivals, tend to have big sales forces that meet with prospects one on one.
Snowflake claims some big-name customers such as Nielsen (NLSN), Adobe (ADBE) Systems, and Sony (SNE)