Cloud data warehouse company Snowflake Computing Inc. has just been handed a big fat wallet to fuel its growth after closing on a massive $263 million round of funding.

The Series E round was led by ICONIQ Capital, Altimeter Capital and newcomer Sequoia Capital, with participation from Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. The round brings total funding to $473 million, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake offers a data warehouse and analytics service hosted in the cloud, which organizations can use to store all of their data in one location for easier access. The company’s biggest claim to fame is probably Chief Executive Officer Bob Muglia (pictured), a well-known face in Silicon Valley who previously spent 23 years serving at Microsoft Corp., leading its server and tools unit, among other roles.

Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse uses the SQL programming language to sift and sort through customer’s data. Those customers can throw in as much data as they want, and have as many employees working with it as they desire, paying for the service as they go. Snowflake can work with both structured data and unstructured data, the company says.

Announcing the latest funding round, Snowflake said it has experienced rapid growth in the last year, increasing both its customer base fourfold and the amount of customer data it stores fourfold.

The company has also added a range of new tools and features to its platform in the last year. These include its “data sharehouse” offering, which allows users to share all or part of their data warehouse with others, subject to defined security policies and controls on access, without needing to copy that data to a new location. Other recent innovations include Virtual Private Snowflake, which is an alternative version of its data warehouse that comes with more security features, and a service called Snowpipe that accelerates data loading to deliver analytics faster.

With the new funding under its belt, Snowflake is ready to embark on the next stage of its expansion, following a three-pronged strategy, Muglia said. That involves doubling down on its research and development efforts through the hiring of more staff, expanding operations in North America, the EU and Asia Pacific regions where it has seen the biggest demand for its service, and developing new products to expand the features of its data warehouse.

“The race for insight is more intense than ever before, so vendors who want to win need deep pockets to be successful,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “Capital can be a growth constraint, it sure isn’t for snowflake in the near term future. Now we have to see what the vendor can deliver in regards of r&d speed and market presence.”

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