Just eight months after its previous nine-figure financing round, Snowflake Computing Inc. today announced that it has landed $450 million in additional funding.

The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from several other prominent tech investors, among them Meritech Capital, Iconiq Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Snowflake’s backers have injected more than $920 million into the startup to date, giving it a valuation of $3.5 billion.

San Mateo, California-based Snowflake provides a cloud data warehouse that runs on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. The offering competes with the native data warehouse services on those platforms, as well as other solutions from companies including Google LLC. Snowflake sets itself apart with a collection of automation features designed to reduce the work involved in managing deployments.

The startup’s platform handles many common infrastructure administration tasks, as well as higher-level activities such as backing up data. One of the main selling points is a feature that enables companies to separately provision storage and compute resources, which allows for both to be precisely matched to user requirements.

Snowflake’s feature set has won over more than 1,000 enterprise customers to date. Speaking to GeekWire, Chief Executive Officer Bob Muglia (pictured, second from left) said the startup is approaching $100 million in annual revenues thanks to the strong demand.

Tech firms often wait until they reach the $100 million annual revenue mark before hitting the stock exchange, which seems to be Snowflake’s policy as well. Muglia divulged during the interview that the startup plans to go public sometime in 2020.

In addition to driving revenue growth, Snowflake will use the new funding to scale marketing, engineering and support operations. One of the items on the startup’s agenda is to establish a development center in Berlin that will help accelerate its development roadmap. 

“Over the years, we have expanded across multiple AWS regions and Snowflake is now also serving Microsoft Azure customers,” Muglia said in a blog post. “We will add many more Azure and AWS regions in the months and years to come. Over time, Snowflake will also expand onto other clouds. The next step, cross-region and cross-cloud replication, are currently in private preview for customer testing. We will expand availability for cross-region and cross-cloud replication to other customers in 2019.”

The hiring spree that Snowflake will embark on as part of the expansion is set to see its current headcount of 650 reach 1,000 by year’s end and then double in 2019. The startup has plenty of room to grow: International Data Corp. projects that the cloud data warehouse market will grow from $14 billion today to $20 billion in 2020.

Photo: Snowflake