Snowflake CEO says environment for deals is good as VC-backed startups look for exits

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined the $70 billion company in 2023 when his startup was acquired, says now is a good time for big companies to go shopping for startups. 

On Monday, Snowflake announced plans to acquire Crunchy Data for a reported $250 million. And in an interview with Fortune after the announcement, Ramaswamy pointed to a confluence of factors making the current environment “quite good for deals.”

For venture-backed startups and founders, the benefits of joining a larger company are more apparent than a few years ago, he said. “You could get a lot of funding in the zero interest rate environment, it’s just different now,” Ramaswamy said. 

The number of inbound deal inquiries that Snowflake receives from startups has increased, according to Ramaswamy. 

“A lot has to do with just the external macroclimate for ‘How are companies valued and how quickly can they go public or get acquired,’” he said. “So there is a brisk interest in strategic exits for a lot of startups.”

Snowflake’s Crunchy Data acquisition comes amid a string of deals across the enterprise tech sector, including Salesforce’s $8 billion planned acquisition of Informatica announced last week, Databricks’ $1 billion acquisition of Neon, Datadog’s Eppo acquisition, and ServiceNow’s acquisition of DataWorld.

While Ramaswamy would not say if Snowflake plans more immediate acquisitions, and said there was no specific target number for deals, he noted that the company would continue to be opportunistic about acquisitions, including multi-billion transformative acquisitions. “We are open to it but it has to be for the right company.”

“Sometimes VC valuations can get out of hand,” he said. “You have to worry when a company is valued—take your pick—at 100 times revenue, or 200 times revenue. It’s really hard to make it work.”

Deals and partnerships seem to be an important part of Snowflake’s strategy under Ramaswany, who was appointed as CEO in February 2024. Under his leadership, Snowflake has acquired TruEra, an AI observability tool, and Datavolo, a data pipeline management firm, which Snowflake relaunched and rebranded as Openflow at its developer summit in San Francisco this week. 

The company also announced partnerships with USA Today and the Associated Press on Tuesday, bringing the media companies’ archives of news articles to the Snowflake marketplace. The partnership means that companies building AI applications will be able to visit the Snowflake marketplace and license data directly from the media organizations.

“We feel like we can offer an effective way for people to monetize their data,” Ramaswamy said.

As a startup founder, and former Google executive who headed up the internet giant’s advertising business, Ramaswamy has developed an approach to assimilating acquisitions. 

It’s important to preserve the dynamics that made a startup’s team successful. When Neeva, Ramaswamy’s startup, was acquired by Snowflake, the team stayed together at the new company, he said. 

But, before any deal is struck, there also needs to be a clear understanding between the incoming team and the existing team about the “shared mission,” Ramaswamy says. “I tell founders that we acquire, if we cannot agree on the shared mission, you should not come.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com