By the power of natural design, no two snowflakes are the same.
That’s the idea behind the new data warehousing business Snowflake Computing, which from its very inception, has aimed to be completely unique.
Snowflake Computing is a startup based in San Mateo, and it offers users a novel program called the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse. According to PC World, this service “allows companies to pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users.”
It seems pretty similar to other data warehousing services at first, but its extraordinary feature is the ability to scale up or down automatically to match the data demands of a company, and the hardware essentially manages itself through automatic organization.
Additionally, Snowflake is capable of accepting structured and semi-structured data together; users don’t have to convert their data to one or the other before uploading everything to the warehouse, because the warehouse automatically converts the data to whichever format will optimize the available space and data usage.
Many businesses have already begun implementing cloud-based data warehousing; in fact, nearly 60% of businesses either use this type of service already or plan to use it in the future to manage big data.
But with so many similar warehousing services already on the market, Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia told Fortune that the goal was to create a service different from Amazon, Oracle, and other popular cloud-based services. While these warehousing services existed before cloud computing services became popular and then the warehousing service was built around the idea of cloud computing, Snowflake’s entire system was built with the cloud as a foundation, thus minimizing glitches and maximizing its ability to expand.
The big news with Snowflake is that the company (of 75 employees) just announced that it raised $45 million in Series C round funding, led by big-name investors such as Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Wing VC, according to Tech Crunch.
In addition to nabbing some great investors, Snowflake has already won over some pretty impressive clients, including Adobe, Conde Nast, and International Gaming Technology’s DoubleDown Interactive division.
