At Snowflake, we are on a mission to help customers unleash their data. Our view on the ecosystem is that Snowflake provides the cross-cloud data infrastructure and technology that our partners can stand upon to deliver advanced solutions that empower business users.

Take the media and advertising industry, for example. In order to improve advertising effectiveness, Snowflake recently announced the Media Data Cloud to connect the industry through data collaboration. The media and advertising industry is relying  on the intelligent use of real-time first-party customer data for marketing activation and measurement. This shift has been accelerated by the deprecation of third-party ad cookies which is making it harder to track marketing campaigns  and optimize campaign performance based on real consumer engagement. 

Marketers, publishers and ad tech companies want to collaborate with their first-party data, in a privacy compliant approach, to enable improved targeting, activation and measurement. 

However, customers have lacked an effective way to do so in a secure, non-data movement approach that also ensures customer privacy. Previously, data collaboration required partners sending copies of their data to each other or to a third-party organization which would then gate data access, match data requests and share the results – a model that was hard to scale.

To extend our recently announced partnership, today, we’re delighted to announce that Snowflake Ventures is investing in Habu, a global innovator in data clean room software, which enables data collaboration between Snowflake customers without moving or copying data, while retaining security and privacy requirements.

Habu delivers its suite of data clean room applications natively on the Media Data Cloud, Snowflake’s collaborative data network securely connecting brands, publishers and advertising technology companies. 

Data collaboration and clean rooms are growing in importance in the advertising industry.  For example, imagine a brand is looking to place an ad for its product on a streaming service. The brand has plenty of customer demographics and historical transactions while the media company knows which programs its customers watch. By combining their respective consumer data in a secure and privacy compliant manner, the parties can determine the target audience segment most likely to be interested in the brand’s product. 

At Snowflake, we’re relentless in offering customers an intuitive experience by continually abstracting away the complexity and friction involved in data management. This is what Habu and Snowflake offer media and advertising companies – the ability to collaborate on data out-of-the-box, in a secure and compliant way, where each party retains control and sovereignty of their own data.

By partnering  with Habu, Snowflake is able to help solve some of the biggest challenges to data collaboration and simplify the approach for marketers and publishers to execute their advertising campaign process. We’ve seen tremendous early success with some large Snowflake users, and we’re excited to work with Habu to unlock this opportunity.

For more information on our investment framework, visit the Snowflake Ventures website here.