Snowflake, a cloud data storage company founded in 2012, remained under the radar until its official public debut in 2014. The buzz around the company heightened in August when two heavyweights, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and Marc Benioff’s Salesforce, unexpectedly announced their support. This move signaled to investors that Snowflake was a company worth watching.
When Snowflake went public on Tuesday evening, its shares started at $120 each, surpassing the usual range of $100-110. By Wednesday afternoon, the share price had more than doubled to $245, ultimately reaching $300 with a remarkable 150% increase before settling at a 112% rise by day’s end.
On its IPO day, Snowflake sold 28 million shares, raising an impressive $3.4 billion. Setting a new milestone, Snowflake now holds the title for the largest software IPO in stock market history, outperforming the previous record-holder, VMWare, by a significant margin of over $2.4 billion in sales. In just one day, Snowflake’s market value surpassed that of some well-known companies in the S&P 500 like Hershey and Allstate.
Recent regulatory filings from Snowflake indicate servicing over 3,100 customers, twice the number from the previous year, with 146 of them being Fortune 500 companies. While Snowflake has not yet turned a profit, the increasing number of recurring sales coupled with the substantial influx of funds and value from the IPO suggests profitability is on the horizon.
