Presented by Snowflake

It’s time to prepare your pitch for the second annual global Snowflake Startup Challenge! The contest objective: to award a total of $1 million in potential investments by Snowflake Ventures to early-stage startups building or considering building a data application based on Snowflake technology.

The winners not only get the chance to pitch their business to Snowflake’s panel judges and audience at the 2022 Snowflake Summit, but will benefit from additional funding possibilities and marketing exposure.

“When it comes to fundraising, certainly the level of interest has been incredible, well beyond where we had planned to be at this point in time without this process,” says Bryan Shupe, co-founder and CEO of OverlayAnalytics, and winner of the inaugural Snowflake Startup Challenge in 2021. “Every day we’re feeling the effects of it changing the trajectory of our business in an amazing way.”

The Startup Challenge is just one more way Snowflake works to promote broader innovation and support continued growth in the Data Cloud. As a former early startup itself, Snowflake’s team understands the data challenges young companies face. The Snowflake platform was built to remove exactly the kinds of obstacles that startups encounter when working with data, including the management of complex infrastructure.

Plus, the Snowflake ecosystem gives startups access to integrations with a broad range of technology partners, and lets companies take advantage of a global network of thousands of organizations that use Snowflake.

Who qualifies?

The challenge is looking for early-stage startups (independent legal entities) with less than $5 million dollars in funding that have not received a Series A or a priced round of funding. They must build a data app that depends on Snowflake as a core part of the architecture. For more details, check out the official rules here.

The deadline is March 1, 2022, for a working application, pitch deck, and demo video.

Submissions will be scored based on:

  • How you are using Snowflake’s unique capabilities to power your application
  • How fresh and original is your application—and will it give you a competitive advantage?
  • What is the business potential for your application?
  • Does your leadership team have the ability to execute?

Judging

Snowflake will select 10 semifinalists next April, then narrow the field to three finalists. Those finalists get free tickets to the Snowflake Summit 2022 taking place in June, plus the chance to pitch their business to Snowflake’s judges and event audience.

The judging panel currently includes 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.

In addition to sharing up to $1 million in investments from Snowflake, the three top finalists in 2022 will be promoted on Snowflake marketing channels. The 10 semifinalists will also get mentioned on Snowflake’s blog.

“If you’re even remotely on the fence considering applying, you should 100% do it,” Shupe says. “Early on in our company’s lifecycle, it was an incredible opportunity and amazingly fun to go through it with your teammates, and it really helps you rally around the core themes and values of what your company’s going to become. It forces you to take inventory and then go deep into the areas you know you’ll have a competitive advantage and then shape that narrative in a way that’s compelling to both investors as well as ultimately customers.”

For more information or to start your application, click here. Snowflake is standing by to hear about what you’ve been building!

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