Snowflake just made a bold move in the data tech world, snapping up Crunchy Data in a bid to supercharge its cloud platform for the artificial intelligence era.
Neither company shared details on the price, but one insider said it lands near $250 million.
With this deal, Snowflake aims to add the muscle of open source Postgres technology to its toolbox, taking a page from the growing trend among tech giants quietly gathering specialist data startups to boost their database backbones.
A surge of these acquisitions has played out all spring.
In recent weeks, Salesforce scooped up Informatica, betting that robust data management will drive the next generation of artificial intelligence tools.
Alation grabbed Numbers Station so its clients could use smart data agents on their own structured stores.
Earlier in the month, ServiceNow brought Data World into its fold to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence as well.
Crunchy Data brings more than a decade of experience with Postgres, a database popular among software engineers and trusted by major names including UPS, SAS, Moneytree, and the US Department of Homeland Security.
Adding Crunchy Data’s capabilities gives Snowflake the leverage to launch Snowflake Postgres soon, promising enterprise-level PostgreSQL for both businesses and its partners like Blue Yonder and LandingAI.
Snowflake’s Big Bet on Postgres
The timing couldn’t be more critical, with artificial intelligence tools hungry for stronger, more adaptable data engines beneath the surface.
Snowflake says customers can expect an early preview of their new Postgres-powered offering in the near future.
Vivek Raghunathan, a senior executive at Snowflake, shared in a statement that the company wants to create the most trusted and all-encompassing platform for both data and artificial intelligence.
He believes this acquisition is proof of Snowflake’s ambition to address an enormous and still growing global market.
Earlier this year, Snowflake rolled out features that linked its own platform directly to both PostgreSQL and MySQL systems, hinting at a strategy that bets big on familiar, widely loved data foundations.
Last year, Snowflake bought Datavolo, another nod toward broadening its portfolio to meet shifting demands in the world of data.
All signs point toward a tightening race among major tech players to court businesses that are racing to build with robust data management, and the data infrastructure underneath has never been more important.
