Snowflake said it plans to sell 28 million shares at between $75 and $85 each in an initial public offering, valuing the cloud-data company at as much $23.7 billion.
Its last private valuation was $12.4 billion in February.
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) – Get Report and Salesforce Ventures, a division of Salesforce.com (CRM) – Get Report, each will buy $250 million the company’s Class A common stock in a private placement.
Berkshire Hathaway also agreed to buy 4 million shares in a secondary transaction, according to a regulatory filing, which was reported by Bloomberg.
Snowflake is part of an emerging niche of cloud companies that address the multi-cloud environments that enterprises increasingly rely on: Amazon’s (AMZN) – Get Report AWS, Microsoft (MSFT) – Get Report Azure, Google (GOOGL) – Get Report Cloud Platform or others may be used for different workloads, and enterprises need services that allow for flexibility.
Snowflake sells data warehousing and analytics services that permit cross-cloud integration, and it has particularly caught fire over the last year.
Okta, which publishes an annual report on the growth of enterprise apps, cited Snowflake as the fastest-growing app in 2019, with 273% growth among Okta customers and their network of app integrations. Snowflake also counts several cloud heavyweights – AWS, Azure, Salesforce and many others – among its base of customers and partners.
Snowflake will be going public at a time when the cloud services are more relevant than ever, given how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted demand for new technology.