Snowflake Raises $26M to Deliver Data Warehouse as a Service

Snowflake Computing came out of stealth with a $26 million funding round, intent on modernizing data warehousing with a from-scratch cloud-based approach. The company has developed a patent-pending architecture that promises to disrupt the decades-old data warehouse market with a solution that decouples data storage from compute.

To help launch the product, the two-year-old San Mateo, California-based startup raised a Series B round from Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Wing Ventures.

Snowflake's CEO Bob Muglia is a former Microsoft executive. The company generally brings vast experience to the table, from companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Teradata.

The startup says its approach builds on top of a relational database with standard SQL and adds the elasticity, scalability, and flexibility of cloud. It will feature native semi-structured data storage.

Dubbed the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the product aims to bring users, data, and all workloads together in a single SQL data warehouse at much lower cost than on-premises data warehouses.