Snowflake makes ninth acquisition of 2023: Samooha, a data clean room maker

Data cloud company Snowflake today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Samooha, a startup building “data clean room” technology to help businesses securely share and collaborate on their first-party data and those of partners.

While the financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed and the transaction itself remains subject to customary closing conditions, the move is expected to give Snowflake, which has been focused on secure data storage, collaboration and application, a major push ahead. 

This is the company’s ninth acquisition of the year to strengthen its product offerings. 

In a blog post announcing the deal, Christian Kleinerman, the data major’s SVP of product, noted that the acquisition will see Samooha’s co-founders, data privacy experts and other employees join its team and “make it even easier for its customers and partners to build, connect and use data clean rooms to unlock the value of their data in the Data Cloud.”

What makes Samooha unique?

In an AI-focused world, where data is the key to building accurate models, companies are racing to build strong data foundations.

However, at a time when internal and external compliance is of utmost importance, doing this with a focus on privacy and security can be a tad difficult.

This is the challenge that data clean rooms have emerged to solve. They are collaborative environments where two or more participants can come together to share and/or combine their respective first-party data in anonymized form (without exposing the underlying information and business logic).

Founded in 2022 by Kamakshi Sivamakrishnan, who sold her previous startup to LinkedIn, and Apple’s former ML privacy and cryptography head Abhishek Bhowmick, Samooha targets the data clean room space by leaning on Snowflake’s data cloud ecosystem.

Essentially, it gives developers and business users no-code, industry-specific templates to build data clean rooms that run as Snowflake native apps and allow users to share, collaborate and gain insights from their and their parters’ anonymized data – in a few steps. 

“Samooha previously partnered with Snowflake and collaborated to build a Data Clean Room (DCR) native application (experience) empowering enterprises to achieve tangible business value with their data across use cases in media, advertising and other industry use cases. Leveraging the Snowflake Native App Framework, Samooha clean rooms…now go beyond restricted SQL queries to advanced machine learning and AI workloads that dig deeper into common enterprise data patterns,” Samooha founders wrote in a joint blog post. 

More importantly, the offering from the company is not data stack exclusive. It allows users to pick their own data sources, from Snowflake data cloud to AWS S3 buckets, and invite the collaborators of their choice, whether they are in Snowflake’s ecosystem or on some other cloud data platform.

Snowflake wants deeper integration

Given the partnership, Snowflake had already invested in Samooh’s series A funding through its venture capital arm. Now, by acquiring the company, it is taking over the technology and talent powering the startup’s data clean room experience. The ultimate goal here is to strengthen the technology’s integration with the Snowflake data cloud and give enterprises using the platform a simple and easy way to build interoperable data clean rooms they need to pool data for their business use cases.

“Building a data clean room from the ground up can be challenging and require technical expertise and significant investment. By prioritizing ease of use, Samooha dramatically speeds up data clean room set-up and reduces complexity… And because Samooha runs directly in the Data Cloud, Samooha leverages the built-in security and governance capabilities of Snowflake, which ensures that customer data is secure and governed,” Kleinerman noted in his blog post.

The product SVP confirmed that Samooha’s team of 19, including founders and data privacy experts, will join Snowflake after this deal. However, he did not share how exactly the company will build on its integration. Multiple native Snowflake apps from Samooha are already available at present, including those targeted at the advertising and financial services sectors. 

“Samooha joining Snowflake, enhances Snowflake’s ability to help enterprises to collaborate in a seamless way, with governance, privacy and security of their data at the core. Businesses and enterprises like healthcare providers, financial institutions, and large media platforms can now create strong edges of value exchange and connectivity across their respective partner and customer ecosystem,” Samooha founders wrote in their joint blog post.

The questions sent to both organizations by VentureBeat remained unanswered at the time of writing.

Ninth acquisition of the year

With this deal, Snowflake appears set to close the year 2023 with a total of ninth deals in its bag – all centered on improving different aspects of its data cloud and taking on competition (including Databricks) to be the one-to-stop-shop for all things data.

Before this, in 2023, the data major acquired Ponder, Sisu Data, TouK nxyz, Neeva, LeapYear Technologies, SnowConvert and Myst AI.