After three rounds of judging and evaluation of hundreds of submissions, a verdict is in. MaxaAI Inc. is the winner of the 2023 Snowflake Startup Challenge.

The competition invited early-stage startups to build innovative applications and products in a quest for winning a share of up to $1 million in potential investments from Snowflake Inc. Maxa uses Snowflake to ingest billions of rows of data to rapidly automate insights from financial and operations enterprise resource planning or ERP systems.

“What we can do, with the Data Cloud, is roll them up, blend automatically the raw transactional data, so now two ERPs become one and then you have complete automated insights,” said Raphael Steinman (pictured, second from left), founder and co-chief executive officer of Maxa. “Very quickly you start moving into more of the operational use cases. That’s super interesting.”

Steinman spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin (far right) at Snowflake Summit during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Alexis Steinman (far left), founder and co-chief executive officer at Maxa, and Stefan Williams (second from right), vice president of corporate development and Snowflake Ventures at Snowflake. They discussed how Maxa built its competition-winning solution using Snowflake’s technologies. (* Disclosure below.)

Support with Snowpark and Snowgrid

Maxa leverages the Snowflake platform to transform ingested data into a unified model that users can understand more easily. The startup uses Python support within Snowpark for model training and forecasting, along with Snowgrid data sharing to exchange information with customers.

“With the Snowflake native application ecosystem, we can deploy the Maxa application directly into the customer’s own Snowflake, which gets rid of all the headaches in terms of security and getting this certified,” Alexis Steinman said.

Maxa’s ability to build a solution that unified large amounts of data in ERP systems caught the attention of the competition’s judges, who included Snowflake co-founder Benoit Dageville and Chuck Adkins, chief information officer at the New York Stock Exchange.

“Maxa has a really great example of…having all of that data in one place and unlocking the CFO, and not having a siloed ERP system that stands out to the side, having actually a system that talks to the rest of the enterprise,” Williams said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE