SAN MATEO: Snowflake, creator of the Data Cloud, announced its first-ever global Startup Challenge.

The Startup Challenge invites early stage organizations that are building applications in the Snowflake Data Cloud to showcase their innovations via online submission, for a chance to be one of three finalists that will pitch to an audience of judges at Snowflake Summit in Summer 2021.

The winner of the Startup Challenge may receive up to a $250,000 investment from Snowflake along with access to a global network of resources including venture capitalists and data experts.

Snowflake’s single, integrated platform enables startups to focus on building their data applications, without the burden of managing complex infrastructure.

Software teams in hundreds of startups and enterprises are already innovating in the Data Cloud, leveraging the global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance, to help their customers acquire new users, uncover security threats, build machine learning models, analyze IOT data, and more.

“Snowflake’s architecture makes it an ideal platform for developing data applications and we continue to be impressed with how application builders innovate to launch their own data products in the Data Cloud,” Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products, Benoit Dageville said.

“This competition will showcase the power of data network effects while also expanding their reach. We look forward to rewarding a top startup who both embodies and employs the Snowflake vision: To mobilize the world’s data.”

Startups that take part in the Snowflake Startup Competition will be evaluated based on a set of criteria, including business potential, level of innovation, and the use of Snowflake’s unique capabilities for their product.

The final three competitors will pitch to a live audience (either in-person or virtually) at Snowflake Summit in Summer 2021. Snowflake Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Persson, Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Product, Benoit Dageville, and venture capital investors Mike Speiser with Sutter Hill Ventures and Carl Eschenbach with Sequoia Capital will judge the competition and pick a winner.

Snowflake’s platform provides many capabilities for startups–including separation of compute and storage, auto-scaling, per-second pricing, native support for semi-structured data, and secure data sharing–to help build differentiated applications, faster. Additionally, startups can leverage integrations with a broad range of technology partners in the Snowflake ecosystem.

Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads.

Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds.

Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the Data Cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. Join Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers already taking their businesses to new frontiers in the Data Cloud. www.snowflake.com