Snowflake Extends Anomalo Strategic Alliance With Financial Investment
The AI and data cloud giant is making an investment of undisclosed value in Anomalo, which develops a data quality platform used by many of the two companies’ joint customers.
The investment arm of data cloud giant Snowflake is making a strategic investment in Anomalo, a developer of data quality management software, the two companies are announcing this morning.
Anomalo and Snowflake Ventures executives, during an interview with CRN, declined to disclose the size of the investment. While both described the amount as relatively small, both emphasized that the goal of the deal is to help cement Anomalo’s already significant role within the Snowflake technology partner ecosystem.
“Really, for us, it’s about strengthening the partnership between the two,” Elliot Shmukler (pictured), Anomalo co-founder and CEO, said in the interview.
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“It’s a pretty large investment from a relationship perspective. I think the capital side is not as important,” said Harsha Kapre, Snowflake Ventures director, in the interview. He noted that Snowflake Ventures operates somewhat differently than other venture capital firms.
Kapre said the investment isn’t a precursor to an acquisition of Anomalo.
“Our goal is to really unlock unique and differentiating offerings with key partners,” Kapre said. “We see a lot of demand for those capabilities, that better-together story, and we're not really that concerned with, ‘How much money are we going to make on this?’ We're more concerned with [whether] this is going to drive adoption of Snowflake. Is this going to drive usage? Is this something our customers need? Are we going to bring some real value to our customers? That's how we look at these [investments].”
Anomalo, founded in 2018 and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., develops a data quality management platform that uses machine learning to proactively and automatically detect and identify data issues within data tables and data pipelines before they impact data analytics or AI processes and applications.
Managing data quality has emerged as a major challenge as businesses and organizations look to implement new AI and generative AI systems. Hence the deep relationship between Anomalo and Snowflake.
Shmukler said about 60 percent of Anomalo’s revenue is generated by customers who are also Snowflake customers.
Anomalo first began working with Snowflake in 2022 and expanded its data monitoring support for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud in 2023. Last September Anomalo announced the general availability of its Snowflake Native App, built using Snowflake’s Snowpark Container Services, which can be deployed entirely within a Snowflake environment to monitor data tables inside the Snowflake platform.
Anomalo is also part of the partner ecosystem around Snowflake’s Horizon suite of data discovery and governance tools and in September achieved Premier Partner status. In January of this year Anomalo’s software achieved Snowflake Ready Technology Validation, verifying that the company’s integrations adhere to Snowflake’s best practices around performance, reliability and security.
And the two companies frequently conduct joint go-to-market activities and collaborate in working with their joint customers.
Anomalo raised $33 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners in October 2021. The company raised another $33 million in January 2024 in a Series B funding round that included Databricks as an investor. Anomalo then raised an additional $10 million in November 2024 in an extension of that round, putting the startup’s total funding at $82 million.
Shmukler said the new investment from Snowflake constitutes a further extension of the B Series funding round. “We were pretty lucky in that we raised quite a bit of money and are very well capitalized,” he said. “We weren't really looking for a huge capital infusion. As [Kapre] mentioned, we were much more excited about how we can work together even more closely.”
“I think there's value in the signal – which is why we don't worry so much about the capital – the signal to the market of the deeper partnership between Anomalo and Snowflake,” Kapre said.
Shmukler said the additional capital will go toward financing Anomalo’s growth, including expanding the company’s staff and accelerating product development – especially continued development of Unstructured Monitoring, Anomalo’s recently introduced product for monitoring unstructured data quality.
The two companies also plan to accelerate the integration of Anomalo’s products with Snowflake Cortex AI, the company’s suite of AI features that use large language models to understand unstructured data and provide intelligent assistance.
The Anomalo CEO said the company has experienced rapid growth by many measures including revenue, annual recurring revenue and annual contract values. In a blog post that’s scheduled to go live today and provided to CRN in advance, Shmukler says the number of Fortune 500 Snowflake customers using Anomalo grew 200 percent in the last year, including major financial service, retail and media companies.
