Cloud data warehouse company Snowflake Computing Inc. is now said to be worth a whopping $12.4 billion following a $479 million late-stage funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Salesforce.com Inc.’s venture capital arm.

In addition to the Series G funding round, announced Friday, Snowflake said it’s entering into a new partnership with Salesforce, with more details on that to be revealed in June.

Snowflake sells a cloud data warehouse service that’s essentially a specialized database for handling analytics queries. The service, which runs on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, enables companies to analyze and process vast amounts of data to try to unlock business insights. Snowflake also competes against rival services from AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.

The company is headed up by its Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman, who previously led ServiceNow Inc. and took that company public.

Slootman said in an interview with CNBC that Snowflake is set to become cash-flow-positive for the first time this year. He noted that the company’s revenue grew by 174% last year and that he expects it to top $1 billion this year.

In a second interview with San Francisco Business Times, Slootman said the company didn’t actually need any additional capital. Rather, the latest funding round is part of a “strategic alliance” with Salesforce. He said it makes sense because nearly all of Snowflake’s customers are using Salesforce data on the platform.

“We wanted to advance our content strategy,” Slootman said. “We need core data assets, or content, put onto the Snowflake platform and that is why we are doing this.”

Snowflake’s next step could be to launch an initial public offering, with Slootman saying that could happen as soon as this summer, although nothing is guaranteed at this point.

“The funding has zero effect on our IPO timeline,” he said. “They are completely separate considerations. I have previously said I felt the earliest we could go out with an IPO would be this summer. It doesn’t mean we will do it then, but that would be the earliest I feel we could do it.”

Slootman also dismissed the suggestion that Salesforce might attempt to acquire Snowflake outright, saying the company’s board had previously told him there was no interest in selling.

Image: Snowflake Computing