Snowflake’s newest cloud data warehouse takes aim at regulated industries

Snowflake, makers of a cloud data warehouse service, announced a new virtual private product that should appeal to highly regulated companies like financial services and healthcare.

In fact, the company also announced that one of the product’s earliest customers, Capital One, will be investing $5 million in Snowflake as a strategic investor as a result of this new approach.

Most Snowflake customers use the product in a multi-tenant cloud where users share resources across the service, but the new Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) service gives customers a dedicated set of resources, says company CEO Bob Muglia.

“The key is that it’s dedicated. We are running the data privately and have encrypted computers fully dedicated to [the individual] customer,” Muglia told TechCrunch.

Snowflake has created this private version of its product to meet the very specific needs of regulated customers. In practice, that means each VPS customer gets a managed version of Snowflake inside a dedicated AWS Virtual Private Cloud instance. In addition, they also get control of their own encryption keys and other features like industry-specific compliance such as HIPAA for healthcare and PCI DSS for credit card payments.

As for the investment, Muglia says Capital One’s venture arm, Capital One Growth Venture Partners, took an interest as they were working with the credit card giant, and announced the investment this week after concluding the business side of the arrangement.

The investment is actually tacked onto the $100 million Series D round from April 2017 for a total of $105 million for those of you keeping track at home. With this additional money, Snowflake has raised a total of $210 million in funding.

The company has over 750 customers and 270 employees, up from 175 in April when it announced the $100 million funding round.