Sridhar Ramaswamy: From Neeva's co-founder to Snowflake's new CEO

Data Cloud company Snowflake has named Sridhar Ramaswamy as its new chief executive officer and member of the Board of Directors. Ramaswamy takes over the role from Frank Slootman who has decided to retire. Ramaswamy, who was earlier the senior vice president of artificial intelligence (AI) at Snowflake, will assume the new post effective immediately.

“In the last 12 years, Frank and the entire team have established Snowflake as the leading cloud data platform that is providing enterprises with the secure, scalable and cost effective data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks they need to build for the future,” said Ramaswamy. “My focus will be on accelerating our ability to bring innovation to our customers and partners.”

Who is Sridhar Ramaswamy

Ramaswamy joined Snowflake in May 2023 after his company Neeva was acquired by the organisation. Neeva, founded as generative AI-based search service provider by Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. When the company launched its search engine in February 2023, it was being widely touted as the rival to Google. Neeva AI could combine multiple results from different sources to create an answer. Within a few months, however, Neeva’s founders admitted that the search engine was unable to attract enough users.

In a blog in May last year, the founders wrote, “There is no longer a path towards creating a sustainable business in consumer search. As a result, over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product, and shifting to a new area of focus.” Shortly after, Snowflake announced the acquisition of the beleaguered startup for $185 million.

Snowflake said that Neeva created a product that offers ‘unique and transformative search experience’ using generative AI. “The ability for teams to discover precisely the right data point, data asset, or data insight is critical to maximising the value of data,” the company added. 

Ramaswamy came on board to lead Snowflake’s AI strategy, and in a year’s time he led the launch of  Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service for businesses to leverage AI.

Before founding Neeva, Ramaswamy worked at Google. He led the Advertising products division including elements of search, display, analytics, shopping, payments, and travels. In his career, he has held prominent positions at companies such as Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). Ramaswamy is an alum of IIT Madras and Brown University.

Frank Slootman’s retirement

Slootman joined Snowflake in 2019, and in the following Snowflake went public. In 2020, Snowflake became the largest software based initial public offering and more than doubled in its debut.

Apart from leadership change announcements, Snowflake also announced its fourth quarter results. The company’s sales stood at $774.7 million, a 32% year-on-year growth. The operating losses for the fourth quarter increased from $239.8 million in the fourth quarter of the previous year to $275.5 million.