Cloud firm Snowflake raises $3 billion in blockbuster IPO

CLOUD data warehouse startup Snowflake saw its shares double on Wednesday, raising more than $3 billion in a blockbuster debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Snowflake shares priced at $120 at the opening bell finished the official trading day just shy of $254.

The San Mateo, Californiabased company has grown quickly since it was founded and was valued at some $12.4 billion in a private funding round early this year.

Snowflake was valued at more than $70 billion based on its share price Wednesday.

“It’s surprising, but it’s a validation of our initial vision,” Benoit Dageville, one of the French co-founders of Snowflake said.

“Snowflake IPO is showing that markets for enterprise software continue to be far larger than most anticipate,” Box cloud computing company chief executive Aaron Levie said in a tweet.

“With exponential growth in data, devices, and apps, something already big today might be 100X bigger in just a few years.”

Snowflake revenue jumped to $264.7 million last year from $97 million the year before, while its net loss grew to $348.5 million from $178 million in that same comparison, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Beginning with our first customers in 2014, the response was beyond our expectations as we addressed major shortcomings of existing solutions and expanded from a data warehouse into an integrated cloud data platform,” the startup said in a regulatory filing.