Snowflake scoops up another blizzard of cash with $450 million round

When Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, landed a $263 million investment earlier this year, CEO Bob Muglia speculated that it would be the last money his company would need before an eventual IPO. But just 9 months after that statement, the company announced a second even larger round. This time it’s getting $450 million, as an unexpected level of growth led them to seek additional cash.

Sequoia Capital led the round, joined by new investor Meritech Capital and existing investors Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures Iconiq Capital and Wing Ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to over $928 million with $713 million coming just this year. That’s a lot of dough.

Oh and the valuation has skyrocketed too from $1.5 billion in January to $3.5 billion with today’s investment. “We are increasing the valuation from the prior round substantially, and it’s driven by the growth numbers of almost quadrupling the revenue, and tripling the customer base,” company CFO Thomas Tuchscherer told TechCrunch.

At the time of the $263 million round, Muglia was convinced the company had enough funds and that the next fundraise would be an IPO. “We have put ourselves on the path to IPO. That’s our mid- to long-term plan. This funding allows us to go directly to IPO and gives us sufficient capital, that if we choose, IPO would be our next funding step,” he said in January.

Tuchscherer said in fact that was the plan at the time of the first batch of funding. He joined the company, partly because of his experience bringing Talend public in 2016, but he said the growth has been so phenomenal, that they felt it was necessary to change course.

“When we raised $263 million earlier in the year, we raised based on a plan that was ambitious in terms of growth and investment. We are exceeding and beating that, and it prompted us to explore how do we accelerate investment to continue driving the company’s growth,” he said.

Running on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which they added as a supported platform earlier this year, certainly contributed to the increased sales, and forced them to rethink the amount of money it would take to fuel their growth spurt.

“I think it’s very important as a distinction that we view the funding as being customer driven in the sense that in order to meet the demand that we’re seeing in the market for Snowflake, we have to invest in our infrastructure, as well as in our R&D capacity. So the funding that we’re raising now is meant to finance those two core investments,” he stressed

The number of employees is skyrocketing as the company adds customers. Just eight months ago the company had around 350 employees. Today it has close to 650. Tuchscherer expects that to grow to between 900 and 1000 by the end of January, not that far off.

As for that IPO, surely that is still a goal, but the growth simply got in the way. “We are building the company to be autonomous and to be a large independent company. It’s definitely on the horizon,” he said.

While Tuchscherer wouldn’t definitively say that the company is looking to support at least one more cloud platform in addition to Amazon and Microsoft, he strongly hinted that such a prospect could happen.

The company also plans to plunge a lot of money into the sales team, building out new sales offices in the US and doubling their presence around the world, while also enhancing the engineering and R&D teams to expand their product offerings.

Just this year alone the company has added Netflix, Office Depot, DoorDash, Netgear, Ebates and Yamaha as customers. Other customers include Capital One, Lionsgate and Hubspot.