Since launching this year’s contest in October, receiving hundreds of submissions, and completing three rounds of judging, the wait is over: Maxa is the 2023 Snowflake Startup Challenge grand prize winner!

Maxa’s goal is to automate financial and operations ERP insights extremely fast and without requiring special skills. To make that happen, it leverages the breadth of the Snowflake platform to transform raw data from multiple financial and operational systems into a common data model that users can understand more easily. 

The team’s innovative use of Snowflake and deep experience with the problem they were solving stood out to the judges. Maxa uses Snowflake to ingest billions of rows of data and transform it into a unified model, Python support via Snowpark to run model training and forecasting inside Snowflake, data sharing via Snowgrid to consume and share data with customers around the world, Streamlit to power the Operator UI and self-service experience, and more.

The challenge of making financial and ERP data friendly to business teams has fueled Maxa’s journey from a managed app in 2020 to a Snowflake Native App now available in Snowflake Marketplace. Check out this just-released Q&A with Alexis Steinman, Co-CEO of Maxa to learn more about everything from how they found their market fit to their perspective on Snowflake Native Apps.

The 2023 Snowflake Startup Challenge invited early-stage startups to build innovative applications and products powered by Snowflake for the chance to win a share of up to $1 million in potential investments from Snowflake and valuable mentorship and visibility opportunities from NYSE. 

This year marked the third iteration of this annual event, and a record number of startups from around the globe entered the competition. We saw an upward swing in submissions incorporating generative AI and LLMs, Snowflake Native Apps, automation, and better visualization of analytics insights—showing that startups clearly have their eyes on “what’s next” and are leading the way forward. 

The Snowflake judges selected 10 semi-finalists from the impressive field of entries, then narrowed that list down our three finalists: Honeydew, Maxa, and semantha.ai.

During the Grand Finale at Snowflake Summit, teams from all three finalists presented live to the four Startup Challenge judges: Benoit Dageville, Co-founder and President of Product at Snowflake; Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake; Chuck Adkins, CIO at NYSE, and Brad Gerstner, Founder and CEO at Altimeter. After an intense on-stage deliberation, the judges handed Maxa the coveted snowboard and named them the grand prize winner. 

Honeydew and semantha may not be taking home the title, but each will be considered for up to $250,000 in potential funding from Snowflake. 

Honeydew’s goal is to break down the silos of business logic. By building a collaborative semantic layer that sits between the data platform and data tools, Honeydew helps ensure that core business metrics like revenue, churn, or daily active users remain consistent. Data teams can organize analytics into manageable and reusable blocks of knowledge supporting every data flow; users can consume them via SQL, Tableau, Looker, Python, or dbt. 

semantha seeks to eliminate information overload with AI services for processing unstructured data like text and video. Teams can use the semantha semantic platform to search large numbers of documents for relevant content, compare it to identify similarities and differences, extract data points, and use those data points to draw logical conclusions. 

If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, be sure to check out our Powered by Snowflake Startup Program that provides startups with resources to build and grow data-intensive applications. And keep a lookout for information about the 2024 Snowflake Startup Challenge—next year could be your chance to take home the snowboard trophy!