UPDATED 19:09 EST / DECEMBER 18 2023

BIG DATA

Snowflake snaps up data clean room startup Samooha in its ninth acquisition of the year

Cloud data warehouse leader Snowflake Inc. is strengthening its capabilities with the acquisition of a data clean room company called Samooha Inc.

Snowflake said today the deal should close by the end of the year, and when it does, it will get its hands on an established data clean room platform that its customers will be able to use to share and collaborate on confidential information in a secure way.

It’s an important capability for Snowflake to provide, because the rise of artificial intelligence means that data has become more important than ever. Companies need lots of reliable and trusted information to be able to train AI models to perform tasks accurately, but much of the data they want to use is highly regulated and sensitive.

Data clean rooms enable this data to be used safely. They refer to collaborative environments where two or more parties can come together and share datasets with each other in an anonymized format, without exposing any of the sensitive details.

The idea has caught on, and there are plenty of options to choose from. For instance, Amazon Web Services Inc. offers a data clean room service, while startups like Habu Inc. specialize in the field. Samooha does too, but its offering is differentiated by being focused directly on Snowflake’s ecosystem.

Founded in 2022 by its Chief Executive Kamakshi Sivamakrishnan and former Apple Inc. machine learning and cryptography leader Abhishek Bhowmick, Samooha provides business users with no-code, industry-specific templates for building clean data rooms that can run as native apps on Snowflake’s platform.

In a blog post, Sivamakrishnan and Bhowmick explained that Samooha has already worked closely with Snowflake in the past, collaborating on a native data clean room application targeted at industries including media, advertising and financial services.

“Leveraging the Snowflake Native App Framework, Samooha clean rooms, further backed by privacy enhancing technologies, now go beyond restricted SQL queries to advanced machine learning and AI workloads that dig deeper into common enterprise data patterns,” the co-founders wrote. “This enables every enterprise employee to become an active data scientist putting enterprise and customer data to work without being constrained around a technical resource plan and roadmap.”

Despite being a native Snowflake app, Samooha is not exclusive to that platform. Users can still choose alternative data sources, such as AWS’ cloud. They can also invite collaborators from outside Snowflake’s ecosystem.

Samooha reckons it has seen significant growth and customer acquisition, and in February 2023 it raised $12.5 million from investors, including Snowflake’s venture capital arm.

Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s senior vice president of product, said in his own blog post that building data clean rooms from the ground up is a challenging proposition that requires significant technical expertise. “By prioritizing ease of use, Samooha dramatically speeds up data clean room set-up and reduces complexity,” he said. “And because Samooha runs directly in the Data Cloud, it leverages the built-in security and governance capabilities of Snowflake, which ensures that customer data is secure and governed.”

The details of the financial transaction were not revealed, but Samooha said all 18 of its employees, including Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmick, will join Snowflake’s team.

Snowflake is entering the data clean room industry at a pivotal moment, with analysts believing that the segment will grow rapidly in the coming years. For instance, Gartner Inc. says 80% of advertisers who spend more than $1 billion per year on media use data clean rooms to handle data analytics workloads and measure the results of their marketing campaigns.

Today’s deal brings Snowflake’s total number of acquisitions in 2023 to nine, with some of those earlier deals including Myst AI Inc., Gap Mobilize Corp. and Neeva Inc.

Image: Snowflake

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