Snowflake Inc. is a public company with no controlling owner. Index funds, active managers, founders and executives hold the stock between them. The AI Data Cloud company recorded product revenue of $1.33 billion in the quarter ended April 30, 2026, up 34% year over year.
Snowflake Ownership: Key Statistics
- Snowflake’s market capitalisation reached roughly $110 billion in early August 2026.
- Institutional investors held about 76% of Snowflake shares in the first quarter of 2026.
- Vanguard disclosed a 5.13% stake, the largest single position reported to the SEC.
- Product revenue for fiscal 2026 totalled $4.47 billion.
- Snowflake served more than 13,900 customers as of April 2026.
Who Owns Snowflake?
No single investor controls Snowflake. Shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SNOW.
Institutions held close to 76% of the stock in early 2026. Vanguard was the only holder above 5% named in the 2026 proxy statement.
Directors and executive officers held 4.8% between them as of April 30, 2026.
Ownership works differently at private AI labs such as OpenAI, where a few backers hold large blocks.
Snowflake Origin, Founders and Early Years
Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski founded Snowflake on July 23, 2012 in San Mateo, California. Dageville and Cruanes had built database software at Oracle. Zukowski co-founded Vectorwise.
Sutter Hill Ventures backed the seed round. Mike Speiser, a Sutter Hill managing director, ran the company part-time as chief executive until 2014.
Snowflake left stealth mode in October 2014 with 80 organisations on the product. Bob Muglia led it until Frank Slootman arrived in 2019.
Largest Shareholders of Snowflake
The Vanguard Group
- 17.75 million shares as of March 31, 2026
- 5.13% of common stock
- Only holder above 5% listed in the 2026 proxy
- Position sits mostly inside index funds
BlackRock
- 17.03 million shares in its Schedule 13G
- 5.02% of the Class A stock
- Sole voting power over 15.08 million shares
- Passive holder with no board seat
Frank Slootman
- 7.64 million shares as of April 30, 2026
- 2.2% of the company
- Chairman and chief executive from 2019 to 2024
- Largest individual holder on the register
Benoit Dageville
- 4.49 million shares
- 1.3% of the company
- Co-founder, now founder and chief architect
- Board member since August 2012
Michael Speiser and Sutter Hill
- 2.66 million shares
- Under 1% of the company
- Lead independent director since December 2019
- Sutter Hill wrote the first cheque in 2012
Directors and Officers
- 17.09 million shares held by 14 people
- 4.8% of the company combined
- Counted as of April 30, 2026
- Berkshire Hathaway sold its whole stake in 2024
Who Is on the Board of Directors for Snowflake?
Founders and Company Leadership
- July 2012Michael L. SpeiserSutter Hill managing director and lead independent director. Chairs the nominating and governance committee.
- August 2012Benoit DagevilleCo-founder, founder and chief architect. Served as chief technology officer, then president of products.
- April 2019Frank SlootmanChairman since December 2019. Ran ServiceNow and Data Domain before taking the Snowflake job.
- February 2024Sridhar RamaswamyChief executive. Former Google ads chief and co-founder of Neeva, which Snowflake bought in 2023.
Finance and Audit
- April 2018Mark S. GarrettAudit committee chair. Spent 11 years as chief financial officer of Adobe.
- December 2019Teresa BriggsAudit committee member. Former vice chair at Deloitte and a director of ServiceNow and Warby Parker.
- January 2020Kelly A. KramerAudit and governance committees. Chief financial officer of Cisco from 2015 to 2020.
Technology, Security and Sales
- June 2020Jayshree V. UllalCompensation committee chair. Chairperson and chief executive of Arista Networks.
- April 2023Mark D. McLaughlinCybersecurity committee chair. Led Palo Alto Networks and now chairs the Qualcomm board.
- May 2025William F. ScannellCompensation committee member. President and chief customer officer of Dell Technologies.
Snowflake Products and Services
Snowflake Platform
- Separates storage, compute and cloud services
- Runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
- Customers pay for what they consume
- Competes with Databricks, a name on the AI IPO pipeline
Cortex AI
- Managed language models inside the data perimeter
- Covers text-to-SQL, retrieval and multimodal analysis
- Serves Claude models from Anthropic, plus Meta and Mistral
- Priced inside the platform, not as a separate product
Snowflake Intelligence
- Conversational agent for business users
- Adoption more than doubled quarter over quarter in Q1 FY27
- Recorded the fastest ramp in company history
- Answers questions in plain language
Cortex Code
- AI coding agent for data and app work
- In use across more than 7,100 accounts
- Runs in Snowsight, VS Code or a terminal
- Used by more than half of customers each month
Postgres and Openflow
- Managed Postgres built from the Crunchy Data purchase
- Openflow ingests structured and unstructured sources
- Supports transactional apps beside analytics
- Among the 430 capabilities shipped in fiscal 2026
Marketplace and Sharing
- Live data sharing without copying files
- Third-party data sets and native apps
- Used by Capital One, Siemens and Canva
- Supports native apps built by partners
How Did Snowflake Get Its Name?
The name came from snow sports. Dageville and Cruanes skied together, and the founding team picked Snowflake as a nod to that shared habit.
Mike Speiser, the Sutter Hill investor behind the seed round, is credited with choosing it. The word suited the product. No two snowflakes share a structure, and the team wrote a SQL engine from scratch rather than adapting Postgres or Hadoop.
The name survived the 2014 launch, the 2020 listing and the pivot into AI. Snowsight, Snowpark and Snowpipe followed the same theme.
Snowflake Mission Statement
Snowflake states its mission as empowering every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI.
The wording shifted with the business. Earlier material described mobilising the world’s data through the Data Cloud. AI now sits beside data.
Ramaswamy repeated the line through fiscal 2026 earnings calls and used similar language when the board named him chief executive.
Management ties the mission to a platform that is easy to use, reaches data wherever it sits, and meets enterprise security rules.
FAQ
Is Snowflake an American company?
Yes. Snowflake Inc. is a Delaware corporation headquartered at 135 Constitution Drive, Menlo Park, California. It lists on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SNOW and files reports with the SEC.
Who owns Snowflake?
Public shareholders own Snowflake. Institutions held about 76% of the stock in early 2026. Vanguard reported the largest single stake at 5.13%. Directors and executive officers held 4.8% as of April 30, 2026.
What is the Snowflake market cap in 2026?
Snowflake’s market capitalisation stood near $110 billion in early August 2026. That reflects a share price of about $313 and roughly 347 million shares outstanding.
When did Snowflake come out?
Snowflake was founded on July 23, 2012 and left stealth mode in October 2014. The cloud data warehouse became generally available in June 2015. Shares started trading on September 16, 2020 at $120 each.
Is Snowflake still operational?
Yes. Snowflake recorded product revenue of $1.33 billion in the quarter ended April 30, 2026, a 34% rise on the year. The company guided to $5.84 billion in product revenue for fiscal 2027.