New York (AFP)

The American company Snowflake, co-founded by two Frenchmen in California, has become in just eight years a giant in data analysis worth $ 12.4 billion and playing on the same playing field as Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

It was in 2012 that Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, then both employees at Oracle, decided to set up their own project to "create something different in the cloud", the dematerialized space where billions of data are stored, explains AFP M. Dageville.

Companies, he emphasizes, are no longer based so much on intuition to make decisions, but more and more on the analysis of internal and external data, major trends, to launch a marketing campaign or to manage their stocks.

But brewing this enormous amount of information "consumes a lot of resources", and this at irregular intervals, underlines this specialist in computer systems.

"Snowflake is designed to allocate resources when they need them, and de-allocate them when they are no longer needed, which saves money," he said.

The company also offers a single platform on which it is possible to store all of its data and make an unlimited number of requests. What facilitate their management and operation while remaining easy to use.

- IPO -

"Our vision was to create a new system with a very different architecture," says Dageville. This new approach has enabled Snowflake to rapidly compete with existing players in data analysis, such as Oracle, Terradata or Microsoft, as well as with the new data storage giants, Amazon Web Services or Google, which offer their own management software.

In 2013, the two French joined forces with Marcin Zukowski, an American of Polish origin, to develop their idea.

The reins of the company were first entrusted to Mike Speiser, an investor in Sutter Hill Ventures, then from 2014 to 2019 to Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft employee. It is currently chaired by Frank Slootman, who previously oversaw the development and then IPO of Data Domain and ServiceNow.

Snowflake, which launched its platform on a large scale in the summer of 2015, does not reveal its figures but claims to already have more than 3,400 customers, as in France Accor, Kiloutou or Monoprix, and to have recorded in 2019 an increase in its turnover 173% business.

Such growth quickly captured the attention of investors.

Its latest fundraiser, unveiled on Monday and led by the company Dragoneer Investment Group and by the world leader in customer relationship management, Salesforce, made it possible to recover $ 479 million. Snowflake has more than tripled its valuation compared to the previous fundraising in late 2018.

If the company is preparing to go public, it will be "no earlier than this summer," says Dageville. The company does not yet generate a surplus of cash because it invests a lot to grow quickly but its economic model is "totally profitable", he assures.

The name of the company, snowflake in French, is a tribute to the winter sports that the co-founders appreciate. It is also a word easily recognizable by all, whether or not it is pronounced with a strong French accent, laughs Mr. Dageville.

Aged 53, he admits being a priori "old for this kind of adventure" but "the mixture of passion and expertise" has paid off. Their goal, with Mr. Cruanes, "was really to revolutionize this world on a technical level, we had no financial objective."

Both were trained in France but have long been based in the United States. The idea of ​​setting up their project in Paris did not occur to them.

"To be in competition with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, requires enormous capital and investment, and even in the United States there are not many other places than Silicon Valley to find this kind of financing", justifies Mr. Dageville.

© 2020 AFP