Snowflake buys Smouhaa startup developing a “cloud” data collaboration suite. Companies Announce this morning — adding to the list of big tech acquisitions leading up to the holiday season.
Through the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the month subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake gains an established “data clean room” platform that allows companies to securely share, collaborate, and gain insights from their own and their partners’ data. Regardless of the underlying data stack.
Meanwhile, Smouha is receiving an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock as well as support for Snowflake’s massive technical and engineering infrastructure. All 19 Samooha employees, including CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and co-founder Abhishek Bhowmick, will join Snowflake in some capacity.
“This acquisition advances our mission to mobilize global data by accelerating the combined capabilities of the Snowflake platform for our customers,” Carl Berry, director of Snowflake product management, told TechCrunch via email. “Smouha customers will benefit from many of the capabilities of Snowflake’s built-in platform, as well as the powerful network of Snowflake’s data cloud. At the same time, Snowflake customers will be able to create, connect, and use data clean rooms more quickly and easily, where their data already exists, directly in Snowflake.”
Los Altos-based Samoha, which Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmik co-founded in 2022, competes in the increasingly crowded clean data room space. AWS has a data clean room product, as do startups like Herb. But Smouha was distinguished by its heavy reliance on the Snowflake ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, Snowflake was one of the first investors.
Samooha, a native application on Snowflake, provides a no-code user interface that customers can use to access and create clean room applications. The company is gone Following sectors it believed might be particularly underserved – such as healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail and entertainment – it claimed to include several Fortune 500 brands in its client base.
Buoyed by customer acquisition momentum, Smouha raised $12.5 million from investors including Altimeter Capital prior to the acquisition – valuing the startup at around $40 million after the acquisition closed.
“SAMOHA’s founding premise was that the latest frontier of data and AI would be built on secure foundations of data exchange and collaboration,” Sivaramakrishnan said in an email statement. “Samooha joining Snowflake enhances Snowflake’s ability to help organizations collaborate in a seamless way, with governance, privacy and security of their data at its core. Businesses and organizations such as healthcare providers, financial institutions and large media platforms can now create powerful edges to exchange value and connect across the partner and customer ecosystem.” .
Investing in data clean room technology could be a profitable decision for Snowflake – which… continuous to More than Investor expectations, side note – long term. According to According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers who spend more than $1 billion annually on media will use data cleanrooms for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results and facilitating data integration by the end of the year. Another poll published In early 2023 he indicated that 29% of US marketers would focus more on clean data rooms this year versus 2022, a prediction that certainly wouldn’t be out of the question given Snowflake’s interest.