Snowflake bumps expected IPO price by about 30%, could debut at more than $30 billion valuation
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, far right, addresses the team at an all-hands meeting.
Courtesy of Snowflake
Data storage software company Snowflake has raised its estimated IPO price by around 30% since last week, according to an updated S-1 filing Monday. Snowflake’s IPO is on track to be one of the most popular debuts in a flurry of tech IPOs this month, with both Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce agreeing to buy shares in concurrent private sales.
Snowflake now expects to debut at a share price between $100 and $110, according to the filing. In its last filing on Sept. 8, the company said its shares would likely debut between $75 and $85.
The new price estimate would value Snowflake between $27.7 billion and $30.5 billion. The previous estimate range would have valued Snowflake between $20.9 billion and $23.7 billion.
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. At the midpoint of the new estimated price range, Berkshire Hathaway’s total stake in Snowflake after the IPO would be valued at $674.4 million, compared to the roughly $550 million it would have been worth at the midpoint of the previous range.
Snowflake gives businesses new ways to store and access data in the cloud, rather than relying on databases tied to hardware. The company is growing fast, reporting that revenue in the first half of 2020 more than doubled to $242 million from $104 million a year earlier. However, it faces a complicated relationship with Amazon Web Services — it relies on AWS to host a significant portion of its business, while also competing against its Redshift cloud data warehouse offering.
WATCH: Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on the importance of data during the coronavirus outbreak
