Startup Spotlight: Snowflake tops LinkedIn list

Data warehousing company Snowflake has topped LinkedIn’s annual top US startups list, beating out the likes of Robinhood, Peloton Interactive and scooter company Lime.

In a blog post, Jessi Hempel of LinkedIn gave the methodology for the list as follows: “Our editors and data scientists parsed billions of actions generated by LinkedIn’s 645 million members — and looked at four pillars in particular: employee growth; jobseeker interest; member engagement with the company and its employees; and how well these startups pulled talent from our flagship LinkedIn Top Companies list.”

Snowflake only just qualifies for the list, which is restricted to companies 7 years old and younger, having been founded in 2012 by French ex-Oracle employees Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes.

SEE ALSO:

• Huawei or IBM: Who's driving the $11.5bn modular data centre market?

• Cisco to upgrade Credorax’s data centre network in new partnership

• Top 10 considerations for selecting a data centre provider

• Read the latest issue of Gigabit here

The company operates on a data-as-a-service model, offering data warehousing and analytics  on the cloud – an approach which benefits companies looking for scalability without investing in their own hardware. Competing with the big beasts of Amazon and Microsoft on price and performance, the company has seen rapid growth, with Forbes reporting last month that revenues for the past 12 months were up 237%.

In a press release hailing the importance of data to the bottom lines of its customers, VP of Product, Christian Kleinerman said: “Relentless innovation is the way we approach product development and improvement at Snowflake. Our unique cloud-built architecture empowers users to fulfill a variety of industry-specific requirements and as their requirements evolve, we listen to customer feedback and use that input to continuously improve the product, making the technology work harder and better for them.”

According to Crunchbase, the company’s latest Series F funding round raised $450mn in 2018, bringing its total funds raised to nearly $1bn. Customers of its services have included Penguin Random House, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, Adobe and Capital One, and, as befits a technology startup, it is headquartered in Silicon Valley.