Snowflake announced during its annual BUILD Summit, the next Global Startup Challenge for early-stage companies innovating in the Data Cloud. Following the success of the first Startup Challenge from Snowflake, which saw hundreds of registrations from more than 50 countries, the next Global Startup Challenge offers the three competition finalists the opportunity to be considered for an investment (total of up to one million dollars across the three finalists), as well as marketing exposure at a global scale.
The Startup Challenge invites entrepreneurs and early-stage organizations, that have raised less than $5M in funding, to showcase a data application with Snowflake as a core part of their architecture. Three finalists will be chosen for the chance to pitch their product to a judging panel including senior industry leaders:
* Benoit Dageville, Co-Founder and President of Products at Snowflake
* Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake
* Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO at Arista
* Carl Eschenbach, Partner at Sequoia Capital
Snowflake Startup Challenge winners will be announced at Snowflake’s annual Snowflake Summit in Summer 2022. Application submissions open on October 4, 2021 and the deadline to submit applications is March 1, 2022.
“It was an honor for our team at OverlayAnalytics to be named the winner of Snowflake’s first Startup Challenge,” said OverlayAnalytics founder and CEO, Bryan Shupe. “Snowflake’s Data Cloud delivers the powerful and scalable infrastructure needed for our financial reporting application. The Challenge drove us to mature as a business, opened new doors for promoting our product, and has given our business the ability to expand our team of data scientists and analysts so we can continue to innovate.”
Currently, hundreds of data applications—including those from large software companies as well as startups—are powered by Snowflake. With key features like separation of compute and storage, support for semi-structured and unstructured data, secure data sharing, and ability to code in the language of the developer’s choice, Snowflake enables startups to accelerate time to market and deliver great applications to customers.
“With the Data Cloud, startups can focus on building and growing their data applications rather than managing infrastructure complexity,” said Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products, Benoit Dageville. “We were so impressed with the ideas and execution showcased during the inaugural Startup Challenge and look forward to seeing how this years’ participants come up with innovative solutions that complement and extend Snowflake’s technology to accelerate our mission of mobilizing the world’s data.”