Snowflake Ups IPO Price 30 Pct To As Much As $30.5B

Snowflake Inc. is benefitting from investors who keep pouring money into the cloud as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

The Silicon Valley-based cloud-storage software maker has raised its estimated initial public offering (IPO) price by 30 percent since last week, CNBC reported, based on the company’s most recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing Monday (Sept. 14.)

The company now expects to go public at a share price between $100 and $110, valuing Snowflake at between $27.7 billion and $30.5 billion. That’s up from its original offer of between $75 and $85 per share and an expected value of $20.9 billion and $23.7 billion.

Last week, Berkshire Hathaway reportedly planned to invest more than $570 million in Snowflake. The deal comes as the pandemic has boosted the stock prices of cloud computing companies.

Snowflake says its product provides companies with new ways to store and access data in the cloud, instead of relying on databases linked to hardware. Its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) promises a data warehouse that is faster, easier and more flexible than traditional data storage.

The SEC filing revealed Snowflake’s revenue grew 148 percent in the first quarter and 122 percent in the second quarter as sales boomed. For the first half of the year, sales reached $242 million, nearly as much as the $265 million the company reported for all of 2019. But Snowflake struggled with net losses of $348.5 million last year and since January, losses have totaled $171.3 million.

And, as CNBC reported, the firm is challenged by the complexity of its relationship with Amazon Web Services, which hosts much of its business. Snowflake must compete with Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse product that is part of AWS.

“We believe in a data connected world where organizations have seamless access to explore, share, and unlock the value of data,” Snowflake said in its IPO filing with the SEC.