Introduction
Snowflake operates a cloud data platform that lets enterprises store, share, and analyze large volumes of structured and semi-structured data without managing the underlying infrastructure themselves. Founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski, three former Oracle database engineers, Snowflake went public in 2020 in one of the largest software IPOs at the time and has since become a widely used foundation for enterprise analytics.
Under CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined in 2024, Snowflake has repositioned its AI strategy around becoming what the company calls the “control plane for the Agentic Enterprise” — the governed layer that AI agents pass through to reach a company’s data and systems, rather than just a warehouse where that data sits.
What the company does
Snowflake’s core platform lets organizations centralize data from many sources into a single cloud environment, where teams can query, transform, and share it using standard SQL alongside newer AI-native tools. Its Cortex suite adds AI capabilities directly on top of that data layer, including Snowflake Intelligence, a natural-language analytics interface, and Cortex Code (known internally as CoCo), a general-purpose coding agent that helps customers accelerate data migrations and platform development.
Who it serves
Snowflake’s customers are data, analytics, and engineering teams across nearly every industry, from retail and travel to financial services and healthcare. In its fiscal 2027 first-quarter results, the company named new customers including Holiday Inn Club Vacations and Houzz, and reported that more than 13,600 accounts were using its AI capabilities, with adoption of Snowflake Intelligence more than doubling quarter over quarter.
Company background
Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski founded Snowflake in 2012, building a cloud-native data warehouse designed from the outset to separate storage and compute — an architectural choice that let customers scale each independently and became a significant differentiator against older on-premises data warehouses. Snowflake went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020 under the ticker SNOW, in what was at the time the largest software IPO in history. Frank Slootman led the company through its IPO and early public-company growth before Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former Google and Neeva executive, became CEO in February 2024, a transition that coincided with Snowflake sharpening its focus on AI products. Under Ramaswamy, the company signed a $6 billion multi-year agreement with AWS in 2026 to deepen joint AI infrastructure investment and go-to-market collaboration.
Product and AI capabilities
Snowflake’s Cortex product family brings AI directly into its data platform: Cortex Agents let customers build AI agents that reason over enterprise data with governance controls attached, Snowflake Intelligence provides natural-language analytics for business users, and Cortex Code functions as a general-purpose coding agent that Ramaswamy has described as the fastest-adopted new product in the company’s history. In May 2026, Snowflake signed a definitive agreement to acquire Natoma, a platform built around the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that provides identity governance and access management for AI agents connecting to external tools and systems. Snowflake has said the Natoma deal will let it extend the same governed-data philosophy that underpins its core warehouse business to the actions AI agents take once they leave that warehouse — connecting to SaaS applications, cloud environments, and on-premises infrastructure through a verified library of MCP servers.
Key developments
Snowflake reported fiscal 2027 first-quarter product revenue of $1.33 billion, up 34% year over year, on May 27, 2026 — the strongest sequential product-revenue growth in the company’s history — and raised its full-year product revenue guidance to $5.84 billion. The same day, it announced a definitive agreement to acquire Natoma to add AI agent governance capabilities, and disclosed a $6 billion multi-year agreement with AWS. The company said adoption of Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence drove much of the quarter’s growth, with more than 13,600 accounts using its AI capabilities.
Why it matters
Snowflake’s pivot toward agent governance reflects a broader strategic question facing data-platform vendors: as AI agents increasingly act on data rather than merely reporting on it, the competitive advantage shifts toward whoever can govern what those agents are allowed to see and do. Snowflake’s planned acquisition of Natoma is a concrete bet that owning the identity and access layer for AI agents is at least as valuable as owning the underlying data warehouse, a dynamic worth watching across the broader data-infrastructure sector.
Sector context
Within Brel’s enterprise software coverage, Snowflake competes most directly with Databricks as the two dominant cloud data platforms racing to add AI and agent capabilities on top of their respective warehouse and lakehouse architectures. Snowflake’s emphasis on governed data access also parallels the positioning of Dataiku, though Dataiku focuses on governing the model-building lifecycle itself rather than the underlying data platform.
Sources and references
This profile draws on Snowflake’s official fiscal 2027 first-quarter results and its press release announcing the Natoma acquisition, supplemented by independent reporting from CIO on the strategic rationale for the deal.
- Snowflake — First Quarter Fiscal 2027 financial results (2026)
- Snowflake — “Snowflake Announces Intent to Acquire Natoma” (2026)
- CIO — Natoma acquisition analysis (2026)