Snowflake shares skyrocket on data warehousing player's market debut

Cloud data management and warehouse provider Snowflake went public on Wednesday in what's being called the biggest software IPO in the history of Wall Street. Snowflake shares rocketed on its first day of trading and hit as high as $319 after pricing shares at $120 on Tuesday evening. 

At the end of the trading day on Wednesday, Snowflake's shares closed at $253.93 and pushed the company's market cap to near $70 billion.

The Warren Buffett-backed Snowflake priced its initial public offering well above the expected range of $100 to $110 a share. Berkshire Hathaway also agreed to buy another 4,042,043 shares from a current stockholder in a secondary transaction, also at the offering price.

The company is selling 28 million shares and will raise nearly $3.4 billion from the IPO. At its $120 share price, Snowflake would have gained a market value of well over $30 billion. 

Stock began trading at $245 per share and went as high as $319 before trading was briefly halted due to volatility. At its $245 opening price, Snowflake was worth over $60 billion. 

Indeed, Snowflake has become the most valuable software startup ever to go public on the NYSE.

Snowflake competes with multiple data warehouse providers but has enjoyed considerable success in the mere eight years since its founding. Snowflake offers companies a way to generate, process, and analyze large amounts of data in real time.

For the six months ended July 31, Snowflake reported revenue of $242 million, up 133% from a year ago. Snowflake had 3,117 customers as of July 31. Despite the strong growth, Snowflake is still not profitable and lost $171.3 million for the six months ended July 31 and $348.5 million for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2020.

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