In our quest to continually enhance the Data Cloud for Snowflake customers, we are embarking on a major initiative to expand the value of the Data Cloud to industry verticals, one of which is retail. Think of it as our doubling down on building out an industry-focused Data Cloud that addresses customers’ real-world vertical needs out of the box.

For many years, retailers have struggled to seamlessly combine many disparate data sets into a single unified data model. It has forced them to try to bring together data manually in spreadsheets, while battling inconsistencies in data entry, fields, columns, and metadata. Whether it’s point-of-sale, ecommerce, merchandising, supply chain, customer experience, or financial data, retailers have battled to gain a true omnichannel understanding of their entire businesses and of their customers’ buying behaviors. 

Today, we’re pleased to announce our first industry-focused investment for Snowflake Ventures is in Robling, a purpose-built provider of a retail data model built on top of the Snowflake Data Cloud. 

We are always eager to partner with vertical experts and to provide our customers with the optimal setup and infrastructure to help them map data sources to drive outcomes for specific industry personas. Robling has already proven its best-in-class retail data model drives value for Snowflake’s retail and CPG customers, and Robling’s team has decades of deep domain knowledge focused on solving the problem of retail data unification. 

Retailers have had to pivot even faster amid all the supply-chain disruptions caused in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than ever before, they require access to a data model that enables data harmonization across channels, which ultimately accelerates migrations to cloud-based unified reporting. This is what the Robling Retail Data Model combined with the Snowflake Data Cloud now provides.

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