Snowflake secures $479m in latest funding round alongside key Salesforce partnership

Cloud data warehousing provider Snowflake has announced the closure of a $479 million (£370.6m) funding round, taking the company’s overall funding to $12.4 billion.The funding, which represents the eighth round since 2012, was led by two new investors, in the shape of Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures. The latter is especially pertinent, as a strategic partnership with Salesforce was also announced. More details of the partnership will be announced at an event in June, but for now Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, said the company was ‘looking forward to the positive impact our technologies and services will deliver to our customers and the broader market.Snowflake, which received two rounds of funding totalling $713m in 2018, has long since been a darling of the privately held cloud space. The company polled second, behind only Stripe, in Forbes’ most recent Cloud 100 list, with this publication noting at the time how B2B use cases were progressing significantly ahead of the consumer-based SaaS companies previously en vogue.Salesforce Ventures, who alongside Bessemer Venture Partners consults with Forbes on its Cloud 100, therefore has a very interesting position to play here. Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018 showed the company’s strategy to help its customers tie up data across various clouds. Many how-to guides exist on how to connect Snowflake and Salesforce, as well as AWS, Azure and other clouds where Salesforce users will host data.