The e-commerce provider Maplebear Inc. (d/b/a Instacart) has two constituencies to satisfy. It must meet the needs of customers who order groceries online while helping retailers expand their businesses.

To fulfill this dual mission, Instacart relies on the Snowflake Inc. Data Cloud and the machine learning libraries and tools associated with it.

“There is a lot of machine learning that goes into the Instacart app,” said Mahadev Konar, (pictured, left), senior director of engineering at Maplebear. “[Retailers] really want to see what’s working, what’s not working, what are the customers interested in. We are also now getting into very personalized experiences for our customers. All of that is machine learning based.”

Konar spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Artin Avanes (right), director of product management at Snowflake, and they discussed Snowflake’s role in supporting Instacart’s growing online business. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for optimization

In addition to providing key tools and libraries through its Data Cloud, Snowflake works with Instacart to fine-tune its systems to run faster and more efficiently.

“We work together to understand where the opportunities [are] for optimization,” Avanes said. “Maybe you don’t need this particular table or this particular dataset because you are not accessing the data as frequently as you might think. When we talk about earning the trust of our customers, it starts with visibility and transparency.”

Snowflake has attracted customers such as Instacart by offering a unified data management platform with multiple ways to query different data types in a streamlined solution.

“We are in a very unique position to leverage the vast amount of data that our customers, like Instacart, are bringing to the platform,” Avanes said. “Think about our collaboration and data sharing use cases where now you can share not just data but applications of any kind that you have built with your favorite language. It is our key differentiation.”

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