Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman
Snowflake
Snowflake, a provider of cloud-based data storage and analysis software, priced its IPO above its increased range in an offering that values the company at $33.3 billion.
Snowflake is selling 28 million shares at $120 a piece, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the pricing hasn’t been made public. The company, which is poised to debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the ticker symbol “SNOW,” is the first of several technology companies to go public this week in one of the busiest stretches of the year.
Investors are bidding up Snowflake’s ahead of the offering as they anticipate a blockbuster opening for a company that’s generating over $1 billion in annualized revenue and grew over 130% in the first half of the year. The company had already raised its anticipated debut price range from a maximum of $85 to a max of $110 in the space of less than a week. Snowflake is growing alongside the major public cloud vendors by providing technology that allows clients to quickly analyze and share vast amounts of data and increase capacity as needed, rather than relying on databases that are tied to hardware.
Last week, Snowflake revealed in a filing that Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce each agreed to buy $250 million of stock at the IPO price in a concurrent private placement. Berkshire Hathaway also agreed to buy 4.04 million shares in a secondary transaction from former CEO Bob Muglia. Based on the IPO price, Berkshire will be paying $484.8 million for those shares.
Snowflake is entering a market that’s hungry for high-growth cloud software makers, particularly those that have shown an ability to continue expanding through the coronavirus pandemic. Even after pulling back this month, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, consisting of over 50 publicly traded companies, is up about 55% this year, compared to a 25% gain for the Nasdaq and 5.3% advance in the S&P 500.
Zoom’s stock is up over 500% in 2020, and Fastly has jumped more than 300%. DocuSign, Shopify and Datadog have more than doubled.