- Snowflake Ventures, the data giant's venture arm, is investing in data companies large and small.
- The company has invested in DataRobot, Dataiku, and Lacework – all prominent data-related startups.
- On Thursday the company also awarded startup OverlayAnalytics with $250,000 in a startup challenge.
This week Snowflake is laying out a broad vision of an expanding "data economy," and setting the groundwork for how the $74 billion data company plans to grow that ecosystem around the information stored in its flagship data warehousing software.
Snowflake is holding its annual user conference — held virtually, this year — where the company has already introduced a data marketplace, developer platform, and program to help companies create products built on its software.
On Thursday the company will turn to investment, and how its venture arm, Snowflake Ventures, is helping to grow startups around it, like ferns beneath a redwood tree.
Snowflake Ventures, which is just seven months old, has thrown its wealth and support behind several notable data-related private companies, including DataRobot, Dataiku, and Lacework. The first two help companies build automation using data, and the last protects data with cybersecurity tools.
Insider spoke with Stefan Williams, the head of Snowflake Ventures, about how the company approaches investment. Williams, a former ventures exec at ServiceNow, said Snowflake is helping to grow "a proliferation of startups" that align with the company's objective of creating a data economy that uses intelligence to produce better goods and services.
Historically getting enough data to launch an AI startup was very difficult, Williams told Insider. "Now you don't have to build and maintain a data pipeline. We are providing a window of access to that data to grow new and innovative ideas."
One such company is Dallas startup OverlayAnalytics, a fintech analytics company that creates streamlined dashboards pulling in all of a companies data – previously trapped in separate spreadsheets of physical servers.
The 15-person company takes granular financial data and pulls it together in one shared dashboard that helps companies "transform it into something of value" – like strategies on when and where to invest, said Bryan Shupe, the founder and CEO of OverlayAnalytics.
The startup is the winner of Snowflake's Startup Challenge, and recipient of an upcoming $250,000 investment from Snowflake Ventures, the companies announced Wednesday. "The patient team at Snowflake taught me how to build our company on the Snowflake platform," Shupe told Insider. The prize represents the bootstrapped startup's first funding.
CEO Frank Slootman said in kicking off Snowflake's Data Summit on Monday that data has been kept in silos and bunkers "since the beginning of time," and the company is trying to provide a home base where all kinds of companies can share the same vast data sets.
"The data cloud is really a strategy to create a springboard" for all kinds of companies, Slootman said in a round table Monday. "Everybody with a Snowflake account is automatically plugged into the data cloud, and can share any data with any other Snowflake account."
Providing that home base is the guiding theme of this week, in the first conference since Snowflake's record-breaking initial public offering in September. Thursday's investor day was "where this all comes together," Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's senior vice president of product told Insider. A big company in the middle of the data economy provides a "perimeter of governance," Kleinerman said, that the company is continuing to grow.
"If anything, Snowflake is getting stronger," he said.
