Snowflake: 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50

The 2020 CNBC Disruptors are 50 private companies at the epicenter of a changing world, poised to emerge from the pandemic as the next generation of billion-dollar businesses.

Founders: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, Marcin Zukowski
CEO: Frank Slootman
Launched: 2012
Headquarters: San Mateo, California
Funding: $1.4 billion
Valuation: $12.4 billion (PitchBook)
Key technologies: Cloud computing
Industry: Enterprise tech, Big data
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 0

George Kavallines

Snowflake is a developer of cloud-based technology for storing and analyzing data. It's one of the most valuable venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley, with a $12.4 billion valuation. Earlier this year, when the company raised $479 million in funding, CEO Frank Slootman thought an IPO could be done this summer. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and essentially killed that plan.

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Still, the company is growing. The most recent funding round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce Ventures, bringing the total amount raised by the company to a whopping $1.4 billion. With Salesforce as a strategic investor, the company can get access to its customers — companies that generate a ton of data and need a way to unlock the insights and potential of all that information. That's where Snowflake comes in.

More than 4,000 customers use Snowflake to tease out useful information from their data that can help them run their businesses better and more efficiently. From a single integrated platform, it can offer a data warehouse built for the cloud and gives companies instant, secure and governed access to their entire network of data. That's important as many companies are now looking to move huge repositories of data to the cloud.