Snowflake

Snowflake is a US technology company founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski, providing a cloud platform originally built for data warehousing and now expanded into what the company calls the AI Data Cloud. The platform addresses the challenge of storing, processing and analyzing large volumes of structured and semi-structured data across multiple public clouds without customers managing the underlying infrastructure.

The platform separates storage and compute so organizations can scale each independently, and includes modules for data engineering pipelines, SQL-based analytics, machine learning development, secure data sharing, and a marketplace for third-party datasets and applications. Customers span retail, travel, financial services and media, including Booking.com, DoorDash and Under Armour, which use Snowflake to unify data from many systems into one governed environment.

1. Elastic compute: Separates storage and compute so workloads scale independently without downtime.

2. Data engineering: Builds and orchestrates pipelines to ingest and transform structured and semi-structured data.

3. Cross-cloud sharing: Shares live data securely across accounts and cloud providers without copying files.

4. AI and ML tools: Trains and deploys machine learning models directly on governed data.

5. Marketplace: Provides access to third-party datasets and applications inside the platform.

6. Unified governance: Applies consistent access control and monitoring across connected data sources.