Presented by Snowflake

---

The first year of the Snowflake Startup Challenge saw hundreds of registrations from more than 50 different countries, says Stefan Williams, Head of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures.

“We were taken away by how powerful the community was around Snowflake, and so now we upped the ante and we increased the winnings,” Williams says. “It’s become a program for startups to plug themselves into Snowflake, get an opportunity to get in front of our customers, pitch investors and the founders of our company, and help them think through how to set up a business and try to grow their companies.”

Snowflake Startup Challenge is a call to early-stage startups from around the world to showcase the creative possibilities for building groundbreaking applications and products powered by Snowflake’s Data Cloud. The winner and finalists may receive up to a total of $1 million in investments from Snowflake, along with global marketing exposure. The deadline is coming up fast: Applications must be received by March 1, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

The company’s goal is to showcase all the reasons developers should look at Snowflake as a core component of their data infrastructure, a platform to help dev teams move fast and build data applications quickly. When an application is powered by Snowflake, it takes away a lot of the complexities around thinking through best practices and architectural setup, and ultimately how a new tech entrant is driving value to their customer, Williams adds.

“We believe we can bring unique data infrastructure, world-class, cutting-edge technology, to help abstract some of the complexities they would have to think through in building the app in the first place, and a platform to springboard from,” Williams says.

How the challenge is making startups stronger

The challenge is a crucible for founders and new companies, Williams says. Previous competitors and winners were profoundly impacted by the process. Founders are asked to articulate why this problem they’ve identified matters –and why would a venture company invest in their business versus another? What’s the market opportunity? And what makes them special?

“It’s an avenue for new companies to start thinking of themselves as real businesses and hone in on what they deliver to customers,” he says. “It really forces you, as a founder and as a new company, to think through the problem that you’re trying to solve, and how to articulate that problem such that people that invest in businesses understand the value proposition they’re delivering, and that they’re delivering it in the right way.”

It’s an especially useful exercise for new companies to take the time to actually drill down into the process of creating a new product, and the thinking that’s required to produce, at the end of the day, not just an application but all the scaffolding that’s required to help get others excited about their business and vision.

The companies that are chosen as the top 10 get a tremendous amount of media coverage, plus exposure at the Snowflake Summit, with tens of thousands of Snowflake customers listening in and watching.

“And as a startup, what more could you ask for?” Williams says. “If you have product market fit, you want to get it in the hands of customers, get in front of tens of thousands of Snowflake customers, pitch in front of the judges at our user conferences. It’s the kind of exposure that startups don’t usually have access to.”

The profile of a winner

The competing startups are judged by a panel of experts across functions from product, marketing, and engineering to corporate development and Snowflake Ventures, as well as partner startup teams. They’re judging by key criteria which fall into two buckets: the venture perspective and the Snowflake perspective. 

VCs are looking at team, product, and market opportunity. In other words, is this the right team to execute on the vision, do they have the right product-market fit that meets a market need, and is the opportunity big enough?

For Snowflake specifically, the judges are most excited about the companies that latch on to the unique functionality that Snowflake has to offer, and showing that they can take that to an industry or a buying persona that Snowflake doesn’t touch today.

Last year, the top three finalists were Elysium, a security analytics platform; Invoke Learning, an educational analytics platform; and OverlayAnalytics (ultimately the top winner), a financial reporting platform. All three leveraged Snowflake as a key component of their data infrastructure under the hood in delivering a SaaS application in three very different areas, taking Snowflake to a use case or persona that they hadn’t known how to sell to previously.

“At the highest level, it’s extending the potential of Snowflake to a new persona,” he says. “It’s proving they have value with some initial proof of concept and/or customers. It’s operating in a market that’s large and is ultimately ripe for disruption.”

Can you do it with Snowpark?

The other thing that made these previous winners stand out was the way they leaned on the latest and greatest versions and new functionality Snowflake had recently released. This year, one of these features is Snowpark, a new feature that allows developers to move beyond SQL, and use their language of choice, whether that’s Java, Scala, or Python.

“There’s almost a tectonic shift happening in the industry where more and more startups are being founded based on this motion,” he says. “With the connected app model, the customer benefits because they no longer have to have yet another copy of their data exposed to a third-party application provider. Customers get to retain control of their data (great from a governance and security perspective), and as a result they can benefit from the ability to join with other internal data to drive additional business value. Snowflake benefits because the customer, by using the application, consumes more Snowflake credits, and as a result, sales reps want to bring those partners into their accounts more frequently. Getting those types of go-to-market tailwinds is extremely valuable at such a young stage.”

How to enter the Snowflake Startup Challenge

The submission period for the Startup Challenge is now open — but applications must be received by March 1, 2022 at 11:59 PM PT. Snowflake will select 10 semifinalists in April, then narrow the field to three finalists who will get the chance to pitch their business to their esteemed judges and audience at Snowflake Summit 2022 in June. 

Submissions will be scored based on: 

• the business potential, including how the startup complements Snowflake
• use of Snowflake as a core component of the architecture
• uniqueness of your application and the competitive advantage it delivers
• the leadership team’s experience and ability to execute

The judging panel will include Benoit Dageville, Snowflake’s co-founder; Denise Persson, Snowflake’s CMO; Jayshree Ullal, Arista’s President and CEO; and Carl Eschenbach, Partner at Sequoia Capital.

Don’t miss the March 1st deadline — apply here!

---

Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].