Snowflake buys Samouhaa startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration suite, the companies was announced this morning — adds to the list of big tech acquisitions ahead of the holiday season.
With 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 enables businesses to share, collaborate and gain insights from their and their customers’ data. their partners safely. regardless of the underlying data stack.
Samooha, meanwhile, receives an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock in addition to supporting Snowflake’s vast technical and engineering infrastructure. All 19 of Samooha’s employees, including CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and co-founder Abhishek Bhowmick, will join Snowflake in some capacity.
“This acquisition advances our mission to mobilize the world’s data by accelerating the built-in capabilities of Snowflake’s platform for our customers,” Snowflake director of product management Carl Perry told TechCrunch via email. “Samooh’s customers will benefit from Snowflake’s many built-in platform capabilities, as well as Snowflake’s robust data cloud network. Snowflake customers, meanwhile, will be able to more quickly and easily create, connect to and use data cleanrooms where their data already resides, directly in Snowflake.”
Los Altos-based Samooha, co-founded by Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmick in 2022, competes in an increasingly crowded cleanroom data space. AWS has a room cleaning product, as do startups like Herb. But Samooha is differentiated by its heavy reliance on the Snowflake ecosystem. Snowflake, as expected, was an early investor.
A native application in Snowflake, Samooha provides a code-free user interface that customers can use to access and build cleanroom applications. The company went It went after industries it thought might be underserved, such as healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail and entertainment — and claimed to count several Fortune 500 brands in its client base.
Buoyed by this customer acquisition momentum, Samooha raised $12.5 million from investors including Altimeter Capital before the acquisition—valuing the startup at around $40 million post-money.
“The founding premise of Samooha was that the newest frontiers of data and artificial intelligence will be built on a secure foundation of data sharing and collaboration,” Sivaramakrishnan said in an emailed statement. “Samooh’s participation in Snowflake enhances Snowflake’s ability to help businesses collaborate seamlessly with their data governance, privacy and security at the core. Enterprises and businesses such as healthcare providers, financial institutions and major media platforms can now create powerful value exchange and connectivity advantages across their respective ecosystem of partners and customers.”
Investing in data cleanroom technology could prove to be a profitable decision for Snowflake – which goes on to exceed investor expectations, side note — long term. According According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers spending more than $1 billion annually on media will have used pure data rooms for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results and facilitating data integration by the end of the year. Another poll published in early 2023 reported that 29% of US marketers would focus more on clean data rooms this year compared to 2022, a prediction that certainly wouldn’t be out of the question given Snowflake’s interest.
