It’s one thing to disrupt an entire industry with a revolutionary technology or business model. It’s something else to disrupt an industry as a step towards your ultimate goal. That’s what we’re doing at Snowflake – disrupting the data warehouse industry on the way to enabling the data economy.

Snowflake’s founders first gathered in 2012 with a vision to enable limitless insight from enormous amounts of varying data through a cost-effective, powerful and secure data warehouse built for the cloud. That vision was realized in 2015, when Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse became commercially available. Since then, Snowflake has grown exponentially thanks to our unique and market-leading architecture that far surpasses what competitors offer via their legacy products – both on-premises solutions and those ported to the cloud.

But that was just the beginning. Snowflake is built to be much more than the disrupter of data warehousing and data analytics. It’s an enabler of something even more important: the data economy, where data is the source of business value. With the data economy, enterprises of all sizes, across all industries and across the globe will generate business value by sharing and consuming each other’s live data in an easy, powerful, cost-effective and secure way.

Today, Snowflake announced new growth funding of $263 million – more than double than all previous funding Snowflake has received. This latest funding will help Snowflake meet the ever-increasing demand by enterprises of Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse.

The funding will help expand our R&D initiatives by growing our engineering team at both our Silicon Valley headquarters and Snowflake’s newest engineering office in Bellevue, Washington. It will also enable us to advance the revolutionary cloud architecture of our data warehouse so our customers will gain even more insight from data to streamline their businesses, better serve their customers and lead their industries.

Snowflake will also use the funding to advance one of our latest innovations – Snowflake Data Sharing, which we also refer to as The Data Sharehouse™. Until Snowflake Data Sharing emerged, enterprises were forced to use risky, costly and labor-intensive methods to share only slices of stale data. With Snowflake Data Sharing, enterprises can provide governed and secure access to live data within minutes to each other. This has far reaching implications across large enterprises, for organizations sharing data within their ecosystem of business partners, and beyond, to commercialize and monetize data in the emerging data economy.

Where to from here? As enterprises realize the limitless possibilities of modern, cloud data sharing, the data economy will grow. To help fuel this growth, Snowflake will continue our focus on removing the barriers to data access no matter where that data resides – within the enterprise, between enterprises or in a multitude of locations and computing platforms that span the globe. Our vision, and our goal, is to enable any organization to become a data-driven leader in the new data economy.