Snowflake expands its startup accelerator with an additional $200M in funding

Snowflake announced plans to boost its startup accelerator with an additional $200 million in commitments, the cloud-based data storage giant revealed.

This latest funding follows a series of activities by Snowflake in recent months, underscoring the company’s growth ambitions.

The Snowflake Startup Accelerator, previously known as the Powered by Snowflake Funding Program, invests in a wide range of early-stage startups. A key focus is on startups creating AI-driven, industry-specific products on Snowflake’s platform. Participants in the accelerator gain technical support, co-marketing opportunities, and AWS credits.

Past graduates of the accelerator include Coalesce, Andrew Ng’s LandingAI, and TwelveLabs.

A portion of the new $200 million will come from Snowflake’s current and new venture capital partners, including Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone Innovations Investments, Bessemer Venture Partners, Capital One Ventures, General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, Hetz Ventures, Mayfield, NewBuild Venture Capital, NTTVC, and Virtue.

However, there’s a caveat. Snowflake clarified in a blog post that while participating venture firms may invest in companies within the accelerator, there is “no guarantee” that any specific company will receive funding or that the entire target amount will be invested.

Snowflake, which also unveiled plans for a new 30,000-square-foot “AI hub” at its Menlo Park campus and a $20 million AI upskilling initiative, continues its aggressive AI investments. Earlier this week, it expanded its partnership with Microsoft to provide access to AI models from OpenAI. Additionally, the company formed a multi-year partnership with Anthropic and acquired AI data pipeline firm Datavolo last year.

Snowflake’s approach appears to be paying off, as the company surpassed Wall Street expectations for its most recent fiscal quarter (Q4 2024), reporting $987 million in revenue.