Cloud vendor Snowflake saw its share price more than double on its opening day of trading, and its valuation rocket to $70 billion, just months after it reportedly mulled a listing that would value it at $20 billion.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman told Bloomberg he was “thrilled with the reception.
“What we have on the whole industry is a product that was built from the ground up, a clean sheet of paper by a group of people who are some of the world’s greatest database technology architects. It’s one that was lacking all this time and one that gets completely redesigned and re-imagined for cloud scale computing. It’s a completely different product architecturally.
“If you compare it to what other people are offering they’re all trying to carry legacy architectures, software designed for machine computing, to the cloud. They find out they can’t take advantage of cloud scale.”
Founded in 2012, Snowflake is yet to turn a profit.
Sales for the 12-month period ending 31 January were $264.7 million, up 174 pe cent on the previous year.
Operating losses widened from $185.5 million to $358 million as capital was poured into sales and marketing, R&D and administrative expenses as the firm prepared to go public.
