At Madrona, we have invested in nurturing and cultivating innovative startups for nearly three decades. Today, we’re excited to partner with Snowflake and some of our peers in the VC ecosystem to continue that commitment through the Powered by Snowflake Funding Program.
This program will provide startups building Snowflake Native Apps with the resources they need to build and grow their data-driven applications in the data cloud, and we’re excited for the opportunity to work with and mentor some of those founders.
Snowflake’s journey started with data warehousing over a decade ago. Since then, with data sharing capabilities, a marketplace, AI/ML features, and more, they’ve become a cloud data platform. With the emergence of Snowpark and Snowflake Native App Framework, Snowflake has put all the building blocks in place to truly enable companies to build the next generation of data-driven intelligent applications natively on Snowflake.
So many enterprises (that startups likely want for customers) are using Snowflake already, and so much data is parked in the platform that if startups want to build intelligent applications that leverage that data, doing so as close to that data as possible only makes sense. This will allow the startups to leverage compute capabilities directly where data already lives and remove the friction and latency (not to mention the security risk) of moving data around. With more data constantly being created, these efficiencies will only become more important.
With the Powered by Snowflake Funding Program to nurture startups and help them be successful on top of its platform, Snowflake is setting itself up for continued success. One important aspect of building a successful platform is activating the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) ecosystem — and startups are a core part of that ecosystem. If ISVs are successful, a platform automatically becomes successful, creating a virtuous cycle of more successful applications being built on that platform.
A great example of a startup that is already growing on the Snowflake platform is Relational AI. We invested in Relational in 2021 — it is a next-generation database platform that, for the first time, combines the power of a relational database engine and a knowledge graph processing system. Its platform is fundamental to how next-generation data-driven intelligent applications will be built.
RelationalAI is working to simplify computing for intelligent application building with the industry’s first and only AI coprocessor for data clouds and language models. RelationalAI’s relational knowledge graph system offers seamless, integrated support for graph analytics, reasoning, optimization, and other composite AI workloads to the thousands of Snowflake Data Cloud users.
RelationalAI has already demonstrated success with early adopters, enabling better business decisions for customers across industries, including financial services, retail, and telecommunications for business-critical workloads. As a cloud-native service, storage and compute are separated, allowing RelationalAI users to harness the power of their data that coexists with their business logic in Snowflake’s secure and governed environment, eliminating redundancies and reducing complexity, costs, and time to value.
Madrona has had a strong relationship with Snowflake since first investing in the company in 2017 and then saw them through the IPO journey in 2020. This is the next step in our ongoing relationship and partnership with Snowflake, and we’re excited to play our role in identifying the latest and greatest startups building Snowflake Native Apps and accelerating a new era of software development.